ODDS’N’SODS — A man `over the range’

(The following story is characteristic of the life and death of many placer miners in early years. The individual described, Stumpy Wicks, worked on the Coeur d’Alene River, in Idaho.)

Stumpy Wicks was dead. The mountain fever had killed him. A few days before, he started off into the hills, telling the boys he would find something rich or never go out again. He did not find anything rich, and he never had the chance to go out again. The fever laid its grip upon him, and in three days he was dead. He had “gone over the range,” the boys said. It became necessary to bury Stumpy Wicks, but how was it to be done? By his relatives? He had none. By his pard? He had none. By the town? There was none. Forty years ago, Stumpy Wicks had left his home — no one knows where — and his people — no one knows who — to wander in the west. He died alone. His wife, his mother, his sister — if he had one — will never know where he died or whose hands laid him in the grave.

It was the boys. They got together and made a coffin out of a box or two and covered it with black cloth. They put Stumpy into it, with a clean flour sack over his poor, dead face. They chipped in and hired an ex-parson, who for some years had abandoned his profession, to give Stumpy a send-off. They dug a grave to a good depth in the tough, red earth. They went out and found a flat rock for a headstone, and on it, with an engineer’s graver, they scratched the brief epitaph “Stumpy Wicks.” Then they followed the coffin wagon to the grave, walking through the mud and rain.

There were 40 men in that funeral procession, and not one woman. Very few were drunk, and nearly all had taken off their six-shooters. There were 40 men who stood around that open grave, and not one woman to drop a tear, as the ex-parson read a brief portion of the Episcopal burial service and offered a short prayer for the safe journey of Stumpy’s soul “over the range.” There was no history of Stumpy’s life. No one knew his history, though it was doubtless a sad one, full of slips and stumbles but full of hope, perhaps before he had finally lost his grip. They found a woman’s picture, very old and quite worn out indeed, in Stumpy’s pocket, and it was buried with him. Not a tear was shed at Stumpy’s funeral. Not a sob was heard, but neither were there any oaths or any laughter.

When the time came to fill up the grave, ready hearts assisted ready hands, and the experienced miners quickly did the work. They rounded up the mound and fitted up the headstone. When the ex-parson stepped back from the grave, he stumbled over the headstone of Billy Robbins the gambler, whom Antoine Sanchez had knifed. There were a good many of the boys resting there. The bullet, the knife and the mountain fever had finished them.

There was nothing green in this graveyard — no living plants, no little flowers. It lay red and bare upon a red and bare hillside. There were no white stones to mark the homes of the sleepers; those used were of rough, red granite.

The boys were quiet. They looked up at the grey sky and the sky, as if in sympathy over the fact that no tears were shed, wept some upon them. As the procession broke up and moved back to the saloons, one was heard to say that it was the “damnedest, mournfulest plantin’ he ever had a hand in.” In fact, the camp did not get back to its normal condition until the next day. There was something sad for even these rough souls in the lonely, unwept death of Stumpy Wicks. It made them think, and I wonder if some of them did not reach out their arms from their blankets that night and hold them up and call out softly: “Oh, Stumpy, Stumpy. What is it you see over the range? After a wretched, broken life, what is there for a man `over the range?'” — From the “History of North Idaho.” This item was published in the “Coeur d’Alene Eagle,” May 3, 1984. Author unknown.