I was twenty-one years old.
Fired up by dreams of gold.
Rushing West in ’49
to stake a claim to my own mine!
What did I find when I got there?
Thousands of “rushers” everywhere!
Water and sand. That’s ALL it takes.
Swish your pan. Pick out the flakes!
A meal?
A horse?
A place to stay?
Who’d believe what we had to pay!
Bought a shovel. Bought a pan.
Soon I’d be a rich young man.
Water and sand. That’s ALL it takes.
Swish your pan. Pick out the flakes!
Pan after pan, I’d swish and wish
for a glint of pay dirt in my dish.
Asleep at night, what did I see?
Nuggets the daylight hid from me.
It takes more than a flash in the pan
to make a rusher a rich young man.
The gold I found? Just enough to get by.
I gave up when my claim went dry.
Water and sand. That’s ALL it takes.
Swish your pan. Pick out the flakes!
Got a job in a hydraulic mine.
Hated the work, but the pay was fine.
So when I heard about Pikes Peak,
I
was
in
the Rockies
within a week!
Water and sand. That’s ALL it takes.
Swish your pan. Pick out the flakes!
I should have known better.
With a grubstake so small,
I left Colorado with nothing at all.
No job. No gold. Just a shovel and a pan.
But I walked away a wiser man.
