Roughing It
audience waited. At last he returned to his throne, seated himself, and
began impressively:
“Gentlemen, I feel the great responsibility that rests upon me this day.
This is no ordinary case. On the contrary it is plain that it is the
most solemn and awful that ever man was called upon to decide.
Gentlemen, I have listened attentively to the evidence, and have
perceived that the weight of it, the overwhelming weight of it, is in
favor of the plaintiff Hyde. I have listened also to the remarks of
counsel, with high interest—and especially will I commend the masterly
and irrefutable logic of the distinguished gentleman who represents the
plaintiff. But gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere human
testimony, human ingenuity in argument and human ideas of equity, to
influence us at a moment so solemn as this. Gentlemen, it ill becomes
us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of Heaven. It is plain
to me that Heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has seen fit to move this
defendant’s ranch for a purpose. We are but creatures, and we must
submit. If Heaven has chosen to favor the defendant Morgan in this
marked and wonderful manner; and if Heaven, dissatisfied with the
position of the Morgan ranch upon the mountain side, has chosen to
remove it to a position more eligible and more advantageous for its
owner, it ill becomes us, insects as we are, to question the legality of
the act or inquire into the reasons that prompted it. No—Heaven created
the ranches and it is Heaven’s prerogative to rearrange them, to
experiment with them around at its pleasure. It is for us to submit,
without repining.
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“I warn you that this thing which has happened is a thing with which the
sacrilegious hands and brains and tongues of men must not meddle.
Gentlemen, it is the verdict of this court that the plaintiff, Richard
Hyde, has been deprived of his ranch by the visitation of God! And from
this decision there is no appeal.”
Buncombe seized his cargo of law-books and plunged out of the court-room
frantic with indignation. He pronounced Roop to be a miraculous fool, an
inspired idiot. In all good faith he returned at night and remonstrated
with Roop upon his extravagant decision, and implored him to walk the
floor and think for half an hour, and see if he could not figure out
some sort of modification of the verdict. Roop yielded at last and got
up to walk. He walked two hours and a half, and at last his face lit up
happily and he told Buncombe it had occurred to him that the ranch
underneath the new Morgan ranch still belonged to Hyde, that his title
to the ground was just as good as it had ever been, and therefore he was
of opinion that Hyde had a right to dig it out from under there and—
The General never waited to hear the end of it. He was always an
impatient and irascible man, that way. At the end of two months the fact
that he had been played upon with a joke had managed to bore itself,
like another Hoosac Tunnel, through the solid adamant of his
understanding.
CHAPTER XXXV.
When we finally left for Esmeralda, horseback, we had an addition to the
company in the person of Capt. John Nye, the Governor’s brother. He had
a good memory, and a tongue hung in the middle. This is a combination
which gives immortality to conversation. Capt. John never suffered the
talk to flag or falter once during the hundred and twenty miles of the
journey. In addition to his conversational powers, he had one or two
other endowments of a marked character. One was a singular “handiness”
about doing anything and everything, from laying out a railroad or
organizing a political party, down to sewing on buttons, shoeing a
horse, or setting a broken leg, or a hen. Another was a spirit of
accommodation that prompted him to take the needs, difficulties and
perplexities of anybody and everybody upon his own shoulders at any and
all times, and dispose of them with admirable facility and
alacrity—hence he always managed to find vacant beds in crowded inns,
and plenty to eat in the emptiest larders. And finally, wherever he met
a man, woman or child, in camp, inn or desert, he either knew such
parties personally or had been acquainted with a relative of the same.
Such another traveling comrade was never seen before. I cannot forbear
giving a specimen of the way in which he overcame difficulties. On the
second day out, we arrived, very tired and hungry, at a poor little inn
in the desert, and were told that the house was full, no provisions on
hand, and neither hay nor barley to spare for the horses—must move on.
The rest of us wanted to hurry on while it was yet light, but Capt. John
insisted on stopping awhile. We dismounted and entered. There was no
welcome for us on any face. Capt. John began his blandishments, and
within twenty minutes he had accomplished the following things, viz.:
found old acquaintances in three teamsters; discovered that he used to
go to school with the landlord’s mother; recognized his wife as a lady
whose life he had saved once in California, by stopping her runaway
horse; mended a child’s broken toy and won the favor of its mother, a
guest of the inn; helped the hostler bleed a horse, and prescribed for
another horse that had the “heaves”; treated the entire party three
times at the landlord’s bar; produced a later paper than anybody had
seen for a week and sat himself down to read the news to a deeply
interested audience. The result, summed up, was as follows: The hostler
found plenty of feed for our horses; we had a trout supper, an
exceedingly sociable time after it, good beds to sleep in, and a
surprising breakfast in the morning—and when we left, we left lamented
by all! Capt. John had some bad traits, but he had some uncommonly
valuable ones to offset them with.
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Esmeralda was in many respects another Humboldt, but in a little more
forward state. The claims we had been paying assessments on were
entirely worthless, and we threw them away. The principal one cropped
out of the top of a knoll that was fourteen feet high, and the inspired
Board of Directors were running a tunnel under that knoll to strike the
ledge. The tunnel would have to be seventy feet long, and would then
strike the ledge at the same dept that a _shaft_ twelve feet deep would
have reached! The Board were living on the “assessments.” [N.B.—This
hint comes too late for the enlightenment of New York silver miners;
they have already learned all about this neat trick by experience.] The
Board had no desire to strike the ledge, knowing that it was as barren
of silver as a curbstone. This reminiscence calls to mind Jim Townsend’s
tunnel. He had paid assessments on a mine called the “Daley” till he was
well-nigh penniless. Finally an assessment was levied to run a tunnel
two hundred and fifty feet on the Daley, and Townsend went up on the
hill to look into matters.
He found the Daley cropping out of the apex of an exceedingly sharp-
pointed peak, and a couple of men up there “facing” the proposed tunnel.
Townsend made a calculation. Then he said to the men:
“So you have taken a contract to run a tunnel into this hill two hundred
and fifty feet to strike this ledge?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, do you know that you have got one of the most expensive and
arduous undertakings before you that was ever conceived by man?”
“Why no—how is that?”
“Because this hill is only twenty-five feet through from side to side;
and so you have got to build two hundred and twenty-five feet of your
tunnel on trestle-work!”
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The ways of silver mining Boards are exceedingly dark and sinuous.
We took up various claims, and _commenced_ shafts and tunnels on them,
but never finished any of them. We had to do a certain amount of work on
each to “hold” it, else other parties could seize our property after the
expiration of ten days. We were always hunting up new claims and doing a
little work on them and then waiting for a buyer—who never came. We
never found any ore that would yield more than fifty dollars a ton; and
as the mills charged fifty dollars a ton for _working_ ore and
extracting the silver, our pocket-money melted steadily away and none
returned to take its place. We lived in a little cabin and cooked for
ourselves; and altogether it was a hard life, though a hopeful one—for
we never ceased to expect fortune and a customer to burst upon us some
day.
At last, when flour reached a dollar a pound, and money could not be
borrowed on the best security at less than _eight per cent a month_ (I
being without the security, too), I abandoned mining and went to
milling. That is to say, I went to work as a common laborer in a quartz
mill, at ten dollars a week and board.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
I had already learned how hard and long and dismal a task it is to
burrow down into the bowels of the earth and get out the coveted ore;
and now I learned that the burrowing was only half the work; and that to
get the silver out of the ore was the dreary and laborious other half of
it. We had to turn out at six in the morning and keep at it till dark.
This mill was a six-stamp affair, driven by steam. Six tall, upright
rods of iron, as large as a man’s ankle, and heavily shod with a mass of
iron and steel at their lower ends, were framed together like a gate,
and these rose and fell, one after the other, in a ponderous dance, in
an iron box called a “battery.” Each of these rods or stamps weighed six
hundred pounds. One of us stood by the battery all day long, breaking up
masses of silver-bearing rock with a sledge and shoveling it into the
battery. The ceaseless dance of the stamps pulverized the rock to
powder, and a stream of water that trickled into the battery turned it
to a creamy paste. The minutest particles were driven through a fine
wire screen which fitted close around the battery, and were washed into
great tubs warmed by super-heated steam—amalgamating pans, they are
called. The mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly stirred up by
revolving “mullers.” A quantity of quicksilver was kept always in the
battery, and this seized some of the liberated gold and silver particles
and held on to them; quicksilver was shaken in a fine shower into the
pans, also, about every half hour, through a buckskin sack. Quantities
of coarse salt and sulphate of copper were added, from time to time to
assist the amalgamation by destroying base metals which coated the gold
and silver and would not let it unite with the quicksilver.
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All these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly. Streams of
dirty water flowed always from the pans and were carried off in broad
wooden troughs to the ravine. One would not suppose that atoms of gold
and silver would float on top of six inches of water, but they did; and
in order to catch them, coarse blankets were laid in the troughs, and
little obstructing “riffles” charged with quicksilver were placed here
and there across the troughs also. These riffles had to be cleaned and
the blankets washed out every evening, to get their precious
accumulations—and after all this eternity of trouble one third of the
silver and gold in a ton of rock would find its way to the end of the
troughs in the ravine at last and have to be worked over again some day.
There is nothing so aggravating as silver milling. There never was any
idle time in that mill. There was always something to do. It is a pity
that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill,
in order to understand the full force of his doom to “earn his bread by
the sweat of his brow.” Every now and then, during the day, we had to
scoop some pulp out of the pans, and tediously “wash” it in a horn
spoon—wash it little by little over the edge till at last nothing was