BOOK FOR GOLD-SEEKERS.           473
physical distress for the greater number, especially for those who had hastened from offices, stores, shops, clerkships and the pastor's study. Over one-third of the men in camp had very little money or none at all, and knew no way of earning it except by the hardest kind of manual labor, to which they were unused.
It cost $i a night to sleep in a dirty, rough pine bunk. Water sold at 20 cents a gallon, a small dish of beans at 50 cents, tallow candles at two-bits (25 cents), common overalls at $5 each, smoked hams at $12 each, and cowhide boots were disposed of as fast as they could be hauled to camp across the desert from Los Angeles and Yuma for $35 a pair. It was a "ground-hog" case with these commodities for the first i6 months of Tombstone
-take them at the price asked or go without. In I88i all the Tombstone mines that paid well were in the hands of a few persons, and the population of the place had gone down to 5,000. In 1883 the mines, with two exceptions, began to peter out, and the population dropped to 3,000. Since then it has gone down slowly to less than I,ooo souls.
Thousands of people will never forget the rush for the Harqua Hala diggings in the spring of 1892. The mines were found in the northwestern part of Arizona, close to the Colorado river, and the boundary lines between Arizona, California and Nevada. For several months in the winter of I89I-2 there came almost every week, news of the big prospects that a half dozen miners, who had been moving from one camp to another in the territories and in Mexico for nearly a generation, had at last come across at Harqua Hala.
Along in March and April quantities of gold dust and nuggets from the mines came into the hands of bankers in San Bernardino and Los Angeles. The newspapers