officers who had been dazzled by the easily
acquired dollars of the earliest arrivals, and of these officers was
one of the last men his friends thought possible to mislead--shrewd,
calculating, cautious, canny old "Sawny" Graham, post surgeon at Fort
Reynolds in the late eighties.

Yet prospectors and explorers ten years earlier had declared gold would
be found up the banks of Silver Run. In the glorious park country back
of Squaw Canon, where Geordie and Bud had camped and fished and hunted
as boys, the signs of the restless scouts of the great army of miners
were to be seen at every hand. And then finally, in the very September
that followed the return of Graham and Connell to take up the last half
of their course at the Academy, there came sudden and thrilling
announcement of "big finds" along Lance Creek, the upper tributary of
Silver Run; then even finer indications on the Run itself, and the West
went wild. All of a sudden the mountain-sides bristled with armed men
and their _burros_. Camps sprang up in a night and shafts were sunk in
a day. Yampah County, from primeval wilderness, leaped to renown, with
a population of ten thousand. Gold and silver came "packed" down the
trails to the First National. Then, faster than the precious metal came
down, costly machinery, and prices, went up. Fortunes were declared in
a week. Officers and men at Reynolds caught the craze.

Many an old sergeant took his discharge and his savings and went to the
mines; and young troopers without discharges took their lead and
followed suit, and the colonel wired the War Department that if the
regiment wasn't ordered away there wouldn't be anything left to order
in the spring. Luckily, heavy snow-storms came and blocked the trails,
and there was a lull at the mines, but unluckily, not before the few
officers at Reynolds who had saved a dollar had invested every cent of
their savings in the shares of the Golconda, the White Eagle, the
Consolidated Denver, and especially the Silver Shield, and the man who,
through frugality and good management, had the most to invest, and who
had invested all, was Major Graham. When he left there for West Point
the August following he had refused four times what he paid for his
shares, and saw fortune smiling on his pathway to the Hudson. Now, less
than ten months thereafter, on the borders of the Hudson, he saw ruin
staring him in the face.

For there had been assessments, and he had borrowed to meet th