OREGON FOLKLORE STUDIES - WORK PROJECT ADMINISTRATION
Title: The Last Diggings

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Name of worker Walker Winslow Date November 29, 1938,

Address 2069 [St.] Park, Portland, Oregon.

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

(1). 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 Hutton 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 [Willemina?], and it was there Hank Simms
was born in the year of 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.
Question four (4) is answered by Mr. Simms' claim that he has lived in
practically every mining town from Alaska to Mexico. (5) is as yet
unanswered, but Simms is a remarkably literate man.

Mr. Simms is a miner and has worked in every type of metal but tungston,
and at every position in the mines from laborer to superintendent. (7) Mr.
Simms' special skills and interests are those connected with mining -
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 wears 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 seems to be
no flaw in his memory. (10) One of the significant things about the man is
his honesty about his present position, and he 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; be is remarkably free from any
biases that might color the picture 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:
THE LAST DIGGINGS

It has long been proverbial in Oregon, as elsewhere in the West, that a
majority of gold prospectors and miners end up without the gold they spend
their lives seeking. Of the few who are materially rewarded, only a small
percentage keep their gain. As a consequence, most miners spend their last
years in limited circumstances. They are not wholly defeated, however;
orally they live the good years over again, narrating their life stories in
a style that is robust, racy, and picturesque. The following is a living
example.

When I talk I am liable to do some tall running off at the mouth. I am a
long distance talker and for all I know I may take you for a long ride in
the wrong direction. I am a miner and for forty-fifty years I have been
tunneling a shaft straight into this poor-house. You can't call that very
good mining. Most miners is fools and I'll bet you that for every dollar
lifted off the bedrock in this country two was put back on it. Miners is
liars too - honest liars. If you question a miner's word about his claim
you might as well question his daughter's virtue. That's the way they stand
by their lies. I have lied some tall ones in my day, and struck millions in
this old head that no man will ever see or take to the mint. That's how I
got where I am - by being a lying fool. I don't take it you are religious, so
I'll go further and say that miners is damned fools, and that I have been one
of the worst. I'll tell you about some of my special kinds of foolishness.

II.

I am a hard rock man and I learned my business at Kermit, California, up in
the Feather River country. That was a big diggings and some of the best of
the old hands was there. I learned the business from the ground down. You
don't learn from the ground up in my business. I could timber and cut my
own steel before I was twenty-five. We didn't have none of them hardware
store drills in them days. The boss man handed you a bar of steel and said,
"Cut 'er up." You couldn't come no kicks about your drill unless you wanted
to kick yourself. To be a timber man you had to be a first-rate rough
carpenter, and like as not you had to fell your own timber right on the
ground. A man had to know his business and a foreman could tell a greenhorn
like reading beef from a poor ox, and you didn't ask the foreman how to do
anything. He'd just say, "Go ahead, and if it don't suit me I'll let you
know." No one ever got fired in them days. All you had to do was criticise
a man and he quit. There was none of this sucking around like you have now,
and a man didn't hang onto his job like a priest to a parish. Every once in
a while we just drug down our pay on principle, and went down the road to a
new job. They'd call us hoboes now, I guess. But in them days we was known
as Overland Johns, and by god, I knew every creek and cow between here and
Mexico, and right back up to Alaska. You see what it has got me. But in
them days if you were a mining man there wasn't any other way around.
People didn't like the homeguard, and if you stayed in one place very long
that is just what you got to be. If a man kept moving he had to keep on his
toes, and that made good mechanics of us old timers. People hired the
drifters. I'll give you an example of how we got our jobs, and this wasn't
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 into a small
blind pig to wars myself a little. I'm not much of a drinking man, but the
bartender there could see that I was an old Overlander, and he was an old
timer himself. He grinned at the sight of me. We didn't have much to say, but
when I got up to leave for the hotel he calls me and says, "Looking for a
place, old timer?" I told him that he pretty near had the idea. "Well," he
says, "you go see so and so in the morning. He wants a man." Then he asked me
my name, and 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 more questions
than he had any business asking about, where I had been and who I'd worked
for. I told him as much as I thought he ought to know. I could see that the
job was in highgrade and that he wanted to know just who he was hiring. He was
just about to paint my check for me - tall me it was no go [md] when here
comes the bartender and he says, "Say, to and so, ain't you hiring this man.
This is Hank Simms. He don't amount to nothing and never will, but he is a
hard rock man from way back, and so tight in his mining it would take a ten
pound sledge to drive a drill in him, and so honest it would take a pinch bar
to pull it out." "You're hired," says so and so to me. Well, I handled some of
the steepest highgrade you ever did see for that man. I have seen the time
when we pulled down a stand of it that would run 600 ounces of silver to the
ton, and maybe 300 gold, and I don't think that the man ever watched me. He
trusted me and that highgrade was the kind you carry in canvas, so none of it
will leak out. That bartender's word was better with him than a deacon's.

Highgrade ore is the kind that is rich enough to steal the way it is, and
the men who steal it are known as highgraders. There are other highgraders
too, such as the companion that buy property and skin off the cream, and
then sell out to some sucker for a lot more than there is left. But the
kind I am talking about here is the kind that steals ore and peddles it. A
man could be honest as hell until he saw a clump of highgrade, and then all
his principles would leave him. I had a Swede working with me that just
couldn't leave highgrade alone. He was an honest man up to a certain point,
but with that ore there was too much of a strain on it for him to stand up
under. The shaft ran back into the mountain and this highgrade clumped out
every so often. The way you do with that stuff is leave it hanging so the
boss can watch it. He can measure a bunch of it that way and there is no
running off with it. One day we ran around a hanging of extra-rich stuff
and finished cleaning up around it just at quitting time. I went out of the
shaft and left the Swede standing there looking at the highgrade, and then
pretty soon I heard a crash. He couldn't stand it any longer and he had
knocked it down. We went on down to the bunk-house together, and an hour
later along came the foreman, and he says, "[Ole?], I am going to have to
lay you off - you are a good miner, but I got to let someone go and it
might as well be you. I'm going down the hill tonight, and I want you for
company." You couldn't leave the Swede and that loose highgrade in the same
county, and the super knew it. He didn't blame the Swede and he walked
clear to town with him to keep him honest. Now I've been too damned honest.
People used to call me Honest Hank Simms. They ought to have said, "There
goes Honest Hank Simms an his way to the poor-house."


You would think that mining your life away was enough of a gamble, but no.
A miner wouldn't have it that way. He had to buck the tiger and sweat out
hole cards right along with his other prospecting. Sometimes they'd hit but
not very often. I [?] one poor galoot of a Cousin Jack - that's a
Cornishman - came into one place with not enough clothes on him to flag
a handcar. He walked up to the wheel and put his last dollar on the double
O - he was drunk, and it pays 86 to one - and damn me if he didn't
hit the pay-dirt. It wasn't a very big joint and the limit would have been
ten dollars under ordinary circumstances, but Cousin Jack was drunk and the
dealer know that there wasn't no double O's coming up twice in a row, and
so he says, "Leave her lay, Jack." He did, and by damn here comes the old
double O again. The house only had eighteen hundred dollars, and he took it
all. In three days I saw Cousin Jack, and all he had was the jimmies and no
breakfast. The next time I saw him he was bull cook in a Mormon camp -
happy as hell; said that as soon as he made a stake he was going out
prospecting. A real miner never goes prospecting until he has to earn his
grub-stake the hard way. He'd no more take money be made mining or gambling
and do that than a priest would shave with Holy water. I was a little
different, but you see where it got me. I mined right up until a year or
two ago, and I quit my last job because I was too cold - not too old. It
was up in Canada, and you could pitch a biscuit out the cook-house door
onto a glacier.

VI.

Every time I start to get wise you want to point out to me where I am -
in the poorhouse. I don't know that it proves much, though, I'll tell you the
story of a model man - you know the kind: he never drank nor gambled. He went
to church on Sunday, prayed when I would have sworn, and followed the
teachings of Jerusalem Slim to a T. Good man, it was just his way. I had a
Catholic foreman tell me once, "Simms, when I am up on top of the ground the
Pope can tell me what to do, but when we are down in it your word is as good
as his." (The foremen's name was Doyle - an Irishman and a damned good mining
man). Well, this model man worked a claim next to mine, down in Southern
Oregon, way back, say, forty years ago. He worked it hard, prayed like hell,
and when the diggings was about to break up he sold out for a thousand
dollars. The rest of us stayed on until a Chinaman couldn't have panned out a
grain of rice in a day. I figured that this model man would amount to
something. But when I last heard of him he was doing his mining on the side,
like it should be done, and farming and raising a family. When I came in here
to live I was sitting down in the hall one day, and there was an old codger
sitting next to me and we get to talking. Said he was from Southern Oregon, so
I got to playing the names of people I knew at him, and he come back at me. We
went on seeing 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 Prine?
He must be a deacon by now, and rich." Well, I was talking to the model man.
He has a room here. If you want to go see him he'll show you the other side of
the ledge.

VII.

I guess that if a man has miner's blood in him, he can't never make it on
top the ground. He's like a mole; he can tell his way around by the kind of
rock he's in, but the wind don't make sense.