University of Virginia Library

Austin, Mary. "The Hoodoo of the Minnietta."
Century Magazine 74 (July 1907): 450-453.
Author of "Isidro"

SOUTH by east from the leprous shore of Owens Lake, untangling the network of trails that lead toward the lava flanks of Coso, one comes at last to the Minnietta, a crumbling tunnel, a ruined smelter, and a row of sun-warped dwellings in a narrow gully faced by tall, skeleton-white cliffs.

It lies so secretly in the cut of the country rock, and has so somber a tone in the stark, wide light, that you perceive it at once to be one of those places that contribute to the fixed belief of mining countries that the hot essences of greed and hate and lust are absorbed, as it were, by the means that provoke them, and inhere in houses, lands, or stones, to work mischief to the possessor. This is common in new and untamed lands, where destinies are worked out in plain sight. Manuel de Borba could not persuade the sheriff to accept as a gift the knife with which he killed Mariana, and no miner acquainted with its hoodoo will have anything to do with the Minnietta.

Antone discovered it in a forgotten year. No one knew his other name: at Panamint he was called Dutchy, after the use of mining camps, from which you gather that he might have been a German, Swede, Norwegian, Dane, or even a Dutchman. He was a foreigner, very sick when he came to the hills, sicker when he left them; and he discovered the ledge in a three-weeks prospecting trip, from which he returned to Jake Hogan's cabin with his pockets full of ore, elate, penniless, and utterly worn.

He talked it all out with Hogan, on into the night, with the candle guttering in a bottle and the winking specimens spread out on the table between them. The ore was heavy and dull, and had the greasy feel of richness. Between the pains of a racking cough, Antone promised himself great things. He talked on afterward in his bunk, maunderingly, as his fever rose, to which succeeded the stupor of exhaustion. That was why, three days later, not being able to attend to it himself, he asked Hogan to have the ore assayed and to bring him the report. And the report was so little in the eye of his expectation that a week later, loathing the filthy cabin and the ill-cooked food, feeling death in his throat, all his thought set toward home, Antone accepted the two hundred dollars which Hogan offered him for all right and interest in his claim. Hogan considerately saw him off on the Mojave stage, and immediately gathered his pack to set out for a certain gully faced by tall white cliffs, where the outcrop was heavy and dull, with a greasy feel.

Long afterward, when rage had made him drunk, Hogan—his wickedness, as it were, an added poison to his curse—explained how, when it was full dark, when the one street was barred with blocks of light from dance-houses full of roaring song, he had gone down to the assay office, the light of the furnace glowing low and evilly along the ground, with other specimens than Antone's, but so like them in all but richness that Dutchy,

turning in his blanket and shaken terribly with coughing, never knew. That, said Hogan, when he cursed the men who had done him out of the Minnietta, was the sort of man he was; as much as to say, being a toad, he spat venom, and was not to be trod upon. But at the time he must have thought more cheerfully of his offense.

Within a month it was known in all the Panamint and Coso camps, and as far north as Cerro Gordo, that Jake Hogan had made a good strike at the Minnietta.

Hogan organized a stock company to open the mine and build a smelter, and began to grow rich amazingly. Jigging burro trains went up and down with water; eighteen-mule freighters trailed in with supplies in a wake of tawny dust. Beflounced and fluttered women, last indubitable evidence of a prosperous camp, preened themselves in the cabins set askew under the white cliffs.

It is not given to every man to deal successfully with mining-stock companies. Hogan prospecting a grub-stake and Hogan owner of the Minnietta, putting out its thousands a week, were much the same person. Because he was ignorant, Hogan did not understand his stock company when he had organized it; and because he had come into his property by stealth, feared to lose it by conspiracy. Before the end of the second year, Hogan and the Minnietta Mining and Milling Company were taking away each other's characters openly in court.

Hogan got a judgment that gave him little less than half what he asked; contumaciously he carried it to a higher court, and got a reversal of judgment that gave him nothing at all. So at the last he went out of Minnietta with little more than he had brought into it,—folly and shame, you understand, peering with painted faces from the little cabins under the cliff, had had their pickings of him,—and going, cursed it with fluency and all his might. Tunnel and shaft and winze, he cursed it; sheave and cross-cut; pulley and belt; and blast and fall-rope under the hoist. As he had made it, he cursed it in every part. Those who heard him maintain that in the cursing of Hogan was wrought the hoodoo of the Minnietta; but, in fact, it began in the fake assay which Hogan carried to Antone in his bed, a villainy of which he despoiled himself in his cursing, with the wantonness by which a man, checked in an evil, reveals the iniquity in which he shaped it.

After that the Minnietta Mining and Milling Company was not uniformly prosperous; the price of silver went down or the quality of the ore fell off, and there were months at a time when the mine was shut down while the directors settled their private squabbles. Now and then, and always at inopportune moments, the company had streaks of economy.

In one of these they happened upon McKenna for superintendent, whose particular qualification was that he was cheap, and being no spender at the best of times, was not always careful to draw his salary at the end of the month. This was very bad business for a mining country, as McKenna came to know when the next shut-down found him with a salary some fifteen months in arrears. He said uncomplimentary things about the management, but did not unnecessarily harass the directors, because he held his job on half-pay until work began again—all of which was still unpaid when the mine reopened with a small force in April.

By this time, you understand, the Minnietta Mining and Milling Company was in a bad way. When the ore was of high grade or the price of silver went up a few points, they could work the mine at a profit; when neither of these things happened, it ran at a loss, and McKenna was their chief creditor. All this time the flux of mining life slacked throughout that district—slacked and dribbled away down the trails of desolate gulches; poured off quick, as it had come, like the sudden rains that burst over those ranges, leaving it scarred with dump and shaft and track. Houses, full of the cheap, garish furniture of the camps, warped apart in the sun; rabbits ran in and out of the sagging sills. Five days' desolation lay between the world and the Minnietta.

During the shut-down McKenna stayed and looked after the mine, because, as he said, it owed him so much that he could not afford to neglect it; but really because the desert had him, catlike, between her paws. So he stayed on, and tinkered

about repairs for the mill and the smelter. After one such session he was observed to go about in the tumultuous silence of a man with a doubtful project; also he ceased to vex the management greatly about his arrears of salary. That was about a year before the Minnietta was shut down altogether.

In the course of time McKenna, as the chief creditor, brought suit, attached the property of the company, and got a judgment by default.

At that time he could have had the whole district on the same terms, for something had happened or was about to happen in some other quarter which made the value of silver to the ton about half the cost of working it. The first thing McKenna did when he came into possession was to rip up the smelter.

This was before the cyanide process was discovered, and the smelter was of the rudest description, and McKenna had repaired it. Four great bars of virgin silver, half the length of a man's body and of incredible thickness, he took out of it in the way of leakings. McKenna used it to put the property in working order. The thing which was about to happen in Germany or Argentina or wherever, had not happened, or, if it had, not with the anticipated effect. Silver went up. McKenna looked to the management himself, grew sleek, and married a wife. But the hoodoo worked.

In the second year Mrs. McKenna had a child, and it died. Did I say somewhere that women mostly hate the desert? Women, unless they have very large and simple souls, need cover—clothes, you know, and furniture, social observances to screen them, conventions to get behind. Life, when it leaps upon them large and naked, shocks their souls into disorder. Mrs. McKenna at the Minnietta had the arm-long grave under the skeleton cliffs, and McKenna, with no screen to his commonness. Her mind traveled back and forth from these and down the gulch to a vista of treeless, discolored hills. Finally, for very emptiness, it fixed upon McKenna's assistant. The assistant was also common, but he had a little veil of unfamiliarity, and Mrs. McKenna was the only woman within three days. I do not say that, given the conditions, the thing that happened would not have happened without the hoodoo, but it served to take McKenna's mind off the mine, and the hoodoo cut in between. After a while the two went out of the story by way of the Mojave stage, and McKenna, leaving the mine in charge of Jordan, whom he had promoted from his foreman's job to be superintendent, was supposed to have gone in search of his wife. Whether he found her, or if the hoodoo stayed by him in the place where he had gone, nobody ever heard. I think myself that it inheres where it was bred, in the hollow of the comfortless, thick hills. He was, however, bound to lose the mine in some such case as he had got it.

Jordan was the man McKenna had to help him when he ripped up the smelter; he knew exactly how the Minnietta came into his employer's hands, and thought well of it. In every mining-camp there are men incurably unable to be taught by the logic of events. McKenna was certain not to come near the mine again; might reasonably wish to be quit of it. This he might have done profitably, except for the hoodoo, for the grade of ore was increasingly rich. Jordan, as a practical miner, was much about the tunnel, and being left to himself too much, had time for thought, and, as I have said, he was the sort of man who admired the sort of thing McKenna had done. Along in the early summer the direction of the work in the main gallery was altered at never so slight an angle, and in due course of time was boarded over.

Jordan reported to McKenna that, as the main lead appeared to be nearly worked out, it would be better to put the mine on the market before the fact became generally known. Eventually this was done. The selling price was not large, but considering what McKenna thought he knew of the property, and what the purchasers, tipped by Jordan, did know, it was satisfactory to both parties. In some unexplained way the Minnietta came shortly into the hands of the foreman, Dan Jordan, who ripped up the siding, and uncovered a body of high-grade ore.

The Minnietta is a nearly horizontal vein in a crumbling country rock that necessitates timbering and an elaborate system of props and siding. The new

owner had all the petty, fiddling ways of a man accustomed to days' wages. He bought second-hand timbers from abandoned mines, and took unnecessary risks in the matter of siding, and the men grumbled.

Jordan did not get on well with his men; he gave himself airs, and suspected an attempt to cry down his new dignities. He was swollen and sullen with the pride of his prosperity. By this time the conviction of the hoodoo was well abroad in that country, and men were few and fearful who could be hired to work in the Minnietta. When there was a good twenty thousand on the dump the men refused to go into the tunnel again until certain things were remedied. Jordan, who did not believe in it, cursed the hoodoo, cursed the hands, and went down into the tunnel, trailing abuse behind him for the men who followed timorously far at his back.

"Better keep this side the cut, sir," said one of them, respectfully enough. "Them props ain't no ways safe." Jordan kicked the prop scornfully for answer, and when the men, starting back from the sound of falling, dared to approach him, they found him quite dead, his skull crushed and buried under the crumbling rock.

After that the Minnietta passed in due course to Jordan's heirs, two families of cousins who knew nothing of silver mines except that they were supposed to be eminently desirable.

Now, as they had come into the property through no fault of theirs, if the hoodoo were nothing more than the logical tendency of evil-doing to draw to and consume the evil-doer, they should have been beyond its reach. This would have been the case if, as you suppose, the hoodoo were a myth begotten of a series of fortuitous events. But you, between the church and the police, whose every emanation of the soul is shred to tatters by the yammering of kin and neighbor, what do you know of the great, silent spaces across which the voice of law and opinion reaches as small as the rustle of blown sand? There the castings of a man's soul lie still in whatever shape of hate and rage he threw them from him.

There are places in Lost Valley where, in the early fifties, emigrant trains went through—places so void of wind and jostling weather that the wheel-tracks still lie upon the sand, clear from that single passing; other places where, as at the Minnietta, the rock of men's passions lies in the hollow desertness like an infection, as if every timber had absorbed mischief instead of moisture, and every bolt gives it off in lieu of rust.

If it were not so, there is no reason why the heirs of Dan Jordan should have gone to law about it while the price of silver went down and down. They stripped themselves in litigation while the timbers sagged in the tunnel and the cuts choked with rubble. The ore on the dump, by no means worth twenty thousand by this time, went to a lawyer who had been a very decent sort until he became dissolute through prosperity and neglected his family. The battens of the mill, warped through successive summers, fell off, and the boards shrunk from one another and curled at the edges like the lips of men dead and sun-dried in the desert. And the two cousins, who were once very good friends, do not speak. And if they should come together, or the price of silver go up, say, three points, I do not know, unless they are able to charge the enterprise with some counter passion of nobility to sacrifice, how they will escape the hoodoo of the Minnietta.