While traveling southward from Austin down Big Smoky Valley, I noticed a remarkably tall and imposing column, rising like a lone pine out of the sagebrush on the edge of a dry gulch.  This proved to be a smokestack of solid masonry.  It seemed strangely out of place in the desert, as if it had been transported entire from the heart of some noisy manufacturing town and left here by mistake.  I learned afterwards that it belonged to a set of furnaces that were built by a New York company to smelt ore that never was found.  The tools of the workmen are still lying in place beside the furnaces, as if dropped in some sudden Indian or earthquake panic and never afterwards handled.  These imposing ruins, together with the desolate town, lying a quarter of a mile to the northward, present a most vivid picture of wasted effort.  Coyotes now wander unmolested through the brushy streets, and of all the busy throng that so lavishly spent their time and money here only one man remains—­a lone bachelor with one suspender.

Mining discoveries and progress, retrogression and decay, seem to have been crowded more closely against each other here than on any other portion of the globe.  Some one of the band of adventurous prospectors who came from the exhausted placers of California would discover some rich ore—­how much or little mattered not at first.  These specimens fell among excited seekers after wealth like sparks in gunpowder, and in a few days the wilderness was disturbed with the noisy clang of miners and builders.  A little town would then spring up, and before anything like a careful survey of any particular lode would be made, a company would be formed, and expensive mills built.  Then, after all the machinery was ready for the ore, perhaps little, or none at all, was to be found.  Meanwhile another discovery was reported, and the young town was abandoned as completely as a camp made for a single night; and so on, until some really valuable lode was found, such as those of Eureka, Austin, Virginia, etc., which formed the substantial groundwork for a thousand other excitements.

Passing through the dead town of Schellbourne last month, I asked one of the few lingering inhabitants why the town was built.  “For the mines,” he replied.  “And where are the mines?” “On the mountains back here.”  “And why were they abandoned?” I asked.  “Are they exhausted?” “Oh, no,” he replied, “they are not exhausted; on the contrary, they have never been worked at all, for unfortunately, just as we were about ready to open them, the Cherry Creek mines were discovered across the valley in the Egan range, and everybody rushed off there, taking what they could with them—­houses machinery, and all.  But we are hoping that somebody with money and speculation will come and revive us yet.”