(continued)
We slept in the store where our old friend George Hurley was clerking, making our beds down on the floor in the deep dust. Only a portion of the store had been provided with flooring and on the ground part, along near the center, the dust was from two to three inches deep. At this time Ruby was one of the dustiest places I ever saw. Tents and buildings were without floors, and there were no sidewalks.
The town had a number of hotels. Waring recounted that there were no sheets upon the bed of a hotel where he once stayed. He spent a night there to be rewarded with experiences decidedly foreign to him. He said, "I had placed my revolver under my pillow where I could reach it in an emergency, for Ruby provided any number of emergencies daily and nightly throughout the year, and I was prepared for most anything." Nor was his preparation in vain.
About midnight he awoke to discover a man snoring on the floor near his cot. The man was furious when awakened and asked to get out. He told Waring that he had paid for sleeping space in the hotel: Waring related: "Of course I had never before slept in a Ruby hotel and knowing nothing about the customs I could not be sure that the man was not justified in being angry." He apologized to the other occupant. In the morning he questioned the hotel keeper. To his surprise he found that the man knew nothing about it. The only solution to the enigma was that a drunken miner had gone up the stairs during the night and selected Waring’s room as most convenient. Another visit in Ruby found Waring seeking quarters in George Hurley’s store.
The owner received me kindly and when I explained that I had no desire to put up at any of the town’s so called hotels, he offered at once to let me sleep in the store. As usual he told me to take down from the shelves as many blankets as I might need for my comfort and to make my bed on the counter.
Besides its importance as the center of a mining district, Ruby had another claim to fame. It was the first county seat of Okanogan County. Until 1888 the Okanogan country was a part of Stevens County. The territorial legislature in that year enacted a measure creating Okanogan County and naming three temporary county commissioners to organize the new county, appoint its first officers, and to select a temporary county seat. Residents of Ruby decided that their town should be the county seat, while citizens of Salmon City (Conconully) likewise planned for their town. The three county commissioners held their first meeting at the John Perkins ranch on Johnson Creek, four miles north of Ruby, as directed by the law. Guy Waring, one of the commissioners, has left a realistic description of the meeting, March 6, 1888:
It was an occasion I shall never forget. The people of Ruby, hearing of the meeting, all turned out to hold a noisy celebration in our honor. Whores, thieves, and drunkards, and other notorious citizens of the mining town were on hand some time before the oath of office was administered. They were of course agreeably drunk, and serenaded us so loudly that it was difficult for anybody inside the ranch house to hear himself speak.
Petitions and spokesman from Ruby and Salmon City (Conconully) were received. Much to Waring’s disgust Ruby was voted the county seat. It was not necessary to erect many new buildings to house county business, for all the county officers occupied one little shack. Since the county had no safe deposit vault, when the treasurer had on hand about eighteen hundred dollars in cash he put it into an empty baking powder can and buried it on his ranch.
The selection of county officers and the location of a county seat by the commissioners were both temporary arrangements. The first county officers were to serve until March, 1889, or until their successors were elected and qualified. The county seat was to be permanently located by a choice of the qualified voters at the next general election (November 6, 1888), when they should also elect their county officers. In a diary written by Benedict Gubser, of Conconully, is the following entry: "October 30, 1888. Went to Ruby. Took a deer ham along but had a hard time selling it. Ruby people did not believe in patronizing Conconully people. The county seat question was at white heat." Rubyites were not successful in their second attempt to secure the county seat, for Conconully received 357 votes and Ruby but 157. The county officers were removed to the successful town in February, 1889.
Few records remain concerning government in Ruby previous to the time it became the temporary county seat. Like other camps it had the officials necessary to carry on mining with some degree of legality, such as miner’s recorders and judges. According to Waring, the law did not go much farther. He himself served as justice of the peace in his own section of the Okanogan country, and admitted that his job would have been more difficult had he served in that capacity in Ruby or Conconully. In part, he said:
Among the mining population every conceivable crime, except interfering with virtuous women, took place at least once in the course of a year, and in Ruby even more frequently. Killings among the miners were very common, and both whites and Siwashes had a hand in them. But the worst of it was, nothing ever happened to the guilty parties. Either they bribed the Justices or escaped from the territory.
Ruby grew up too quickly and died out to suddenly for the historian to get an accurate picture of every phase of life there. Records have been left, however, which tell something of the social life. There were several ways in which the population found diversion. One of these was hunting in the surrounding country. In the diary of Benedict Gubser is an account of a visit with a certain Andy Funk. This man related to Gubser that he killed ninety-six deer that season (1888) in order to break the record of one "Sago," who killed ninety-two. In the diary of Austin Mires is an account of a hunting trip in the Ruby country during which he and his companions "ran onto tracks of more than fifty deer that had passed along in the early morning."
Dances were seemingly all-inclusive as a means of entertainment. An excellent description of them has been given by E.C. Sherman, first treasurer of Okanogan County. He was of the opinion that Ruby was one of the most sociable resorts for miners and prospectors to be found in any mining region. Quite often the honorable board of (county) commissioners called half hour recess and conferred on some pressing question that was unfathomable any where except at one of the refreshment foot rails. In those days dried or jerked venison was plentiful and miners spent sociable evenings drinking the brewery lager beer of Ruby, chewing dried venison and singing.
The people of Conconully, Ruby and the ranches for miles around were like one big family when it came to amusements. All were acquainted. The women brought sandwiches, cake and coffee to dances and entertainment's. The babies and kiddies slept on benches or boxes. Strangers were introduced to whole gatherings at one moment, and the dance went on merrily.
Another means of spending leisure time was the saloon. Just how many saloons Ruby had in its heyday is a figure open to question. Fact is lacking , opinion ranks them in number from six to twenty. Activity at the close of day can well be imagined as prospectors, miners, and cowboys poured into the town. "Ruby was wide open and often there were thousands of dollars in sight on the gaming tables."
There were also present in Ruby that undesirable social aspect so common to mining towns. Waring gives an almost too realistic picture of this phase in relation to other forces, particularly the law.
On this particular afternoon (in March, 1888) the town was in the heat of excitement over the latest of its many notorious murders which, as I soon learned, had occurred early that same morning. It seems that one of Ruby’s more lecherous citizens had attempted shortly before dawn to gain admittance to the town’s chief bawdy house in a state of complete intoxication. When the mistress of the house, greatly annoyed at being diverted from her business at such an hour, refused to permit him to enter, the gentleman, according to the report I gathered, took a swing at her. Thereupon the mistress, not to miss having the last word on the doorstep of her own establishment, returned to her room for a revolver and shot the gentleman through the heart, killing him instantly. His body had been found crumpled upon the steps outside the house, and by the time the sheriff could be persuaded to inquire at the establishment for details of the "accident" the mistress had found time to board the stage for Spokane Falls, knowing, of course, that a few days later the whole affair would be forgotten in the interest of some new scandal in the town, and she could return unmolested by the law to her former mode of living. As I listened to a group of citizens expound the merits of the case, I gained a still better idea of the level of morality one could expect to find in Ruby. No one cared much about the actual facts of the murder. The chief point of dispute was whether or not the madame had taken a previous dislike to her unwelcomed client because of the damage he had done to her staff of girls, for it was generally known in Ruby, I learned, that the gentleman’s much-discussed limp had been caused by neither infantile paralysis, rheumatism, nor any other common form of affliction or accident.
When I had heard all I wanted to about the deceased and his scandalous limp, I went on to the county auditor’s office, where I was forced to listen to a further version of the murder by an official who, as he casually explained, had been inside the brothel at the time of the shooting and stumbled over the dead body on his way out in the morning.
Waring had difficulties with various members of the populace, perhaps he felt a bitterness that made him enlarge upon an account of this nature. On the other hand, the Ruby town council instructed the marshal in 1892 to remove all houses of ill fame off the main street.
The character of social life in Ruby goes far to explain education and religion in the camp. There is some information concerning education, beginning about 1890. Although the camp had one of the earlier schools in the county, there was but a small number of children of school age in Ruby. It was in 1890 that Mrs. Virginia Grainger took over her duties as fifth county superintendent of education. One of the greatest difficulties of her term arose over the erection of a school at Ruby. According to her, there were about thirty prospective pupils in District 3, slightly more than half that number would be in regular attendance. Some of the most active residents, with the backing of a large floating population, wanted to bond the school district for five thousand dollars and build a school house large enough to be used also as a community hall. Mrs. Grainger refused to sign either the bonds or the contract for the erection of the building. The work went ahead, however, without her signature.
Her opponents bitterly resented the views she held, and the point was brought up that a woman was not eligible to hold that office. while she refused to turn her books over to the county commissioners. When completed, the school was used as had been planned. Mrs. Grainger taught in this school for a year. Arriving there one morning, she discovered four pupils, from five to eleven years of age, lying drunk near the school. A dance had been held the previous evening, and the contents of the bottles left lying about were sufficient to cause intoxication. About the only conclusion one can draw from the last part of this episode is that liquor must indeed flowed freely in Ruby if at times there were surplus.
Religion, like education, seems to have played a minor part in the life of the camp prior to 1890. After that year the evidence offered throws no direct light on the town itself, but rather on the surrounding communities. On February 8, 1891, Benedict Gubser entered in his diary:
