Springfield Globe Republic

Three broad-shouldered miners who sat in the bar-room of the Miners Arms in Front street yesterday and sipped their drinks with the air of men who could afford to pay for them, were talking of the ups and downs of miners in gold and silver enterprises among the Rocky Mountains.
"It beats all," said old Sam Whitaker, as he filled his pipe, "how some men always strike it rich and others has to hustle around to get a grub stake. What's bad luck for some always turns out good for them as is in for it."
"Taint luck," said the bartender, wiping his hands on his partly-white apron. "It's the early bird what catches the worm, and them that humps themselves gits thar some time."
Without noticing the interruption the old miner scratched a match on the bowl of his pipe, and, having thoroughly lighted the tobacco, continued:
"There weren't none of you fellers up at the big bend in the Columbia just after the war, cause if you had have been there I'd seen you. There was a chap there named Frank Laplotte, 'Slick Frank' they called him, 'cause he never turned a hair and had attacks of dust about all the time. He came into camp one night in a canoe that he'd swiped from the Injuns and found lodgings alongside of it on a sand spit where a little brook ran out of the gulch. Bein' that everybody got there ahead of him, there weren't no show for him to stake a claim. Most folks would have called it bad hard luck, but after three or four days a couple of chaps what had prospected over a bit of bottom half a mile away give it up as worthless. Slick Frank 'lowed that it would hold a shanty, and he'd build one, and wait for something to turn up. Bein' as winter was coming on, Slick laid out to make a shanty what he wouldn't freeze in, nohow, and so began to cut away the side o' the mountain where it run down to his claim, keepin' his eye peeled for traces of dust, but seein' nothin'. After about four days work he'd got a perpendicular wall, about ten feet high, to build his shanty against, and had begun to cut his timber for the hut, when a smart chunk of a sapling that he was chopping at fell the wrong way and started a big boulder down the mountain. That fetched a couple of bigger ones along, and they plumped right down on the ground where he'd laid out to build his shanty. That was his first streak of good luck. Most folks would have called it hard luck, but if the sapling hadn't started the rock a snow slide would, and the rocks would have wiped out Slick Frank.
"No he went to work scooping out another place for a shanty, taking care this time that no loose rock weren't hung up above him. He was right under a very solid sort of a precipice this time that he hadn't noticed before on account o' the bush. There was a small stream of water poured over on one side, which he lowed would make things very comfortable when he wanted to mix his grog and for cooking purposes. So, he got a good log hut up after a week's work, and rooted it over with bark and dirt, and banked it up and built a good stone hearth and a chimney at one end. It was a genuine home comfort, and Slick began to lay out for a good time, when early one morning he waked up to find a stream of water trickling over the precipice and square down his chimney.
"Most men would have been exasperated, but Slick didn't have no such word in his sweet lexicon. He just dug a little trench to carry the water out of his parlor door, as he called it. The stream was about as big as your arm, and mighty regular in its flow after it once got its work in. Something had dammed the brook way up the mountain and turned part of the current into a new channel. Slick watched it run for a while, cogitating how he should spout the water away from the shanty, when he noticed that the sand that came down with the water was forming a little ring around the outer edge of the hearth. Without thinking much about it, he scooped up some of the sand and put it under a bit of a magnifier that he carried. He told me afterward that that was the first time in his life that he ever hustled. He'd found the dust in uncommon quantities in that sand, for the new channel was right over a vein of pay dirt, and he wanted to get a trough and cradle rigged without any delay."
The miner here turned toward the bartender, who hastily set a bottle holding a yellow liquid on the table beside four clean glasses, and the miner continued impressively:
"Some men bumps theirselves until their fingers wears out and never raises an ounce, and others builds houses, and while they sleeps the dust gets spouted down the chimney or in through the keyhole, or it gits to 'em some way, and all they has to do is to rig up a trough to catch it: That's what I call luck."