Roughing It
wild cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, _any_ claim not
located on the mother vein, i.e., the “Comstock”) yielded a ton of rock
worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not
putting too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a
thought of such a thing. They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were
happy.
New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run
straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty
“feet,” and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of
it. They did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said
something. Consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect
that the “indications” were good, or that the ledge was “six feet wide,”
or that the rock “resembled the Comstock” (and so it did—but as a
general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you
down). If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of
the country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a
very marvel in silver discoveries had transpired. If the mine was a
“developed” one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn’t),
we praised the tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels
in the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely
out of ecstasies—but never said a word about the rock. We would squander
half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed
pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of
admiration of the “gentlemanly and efficient Superintendent” of the
mine—but never utter a whisper about the rock. And those people were
always pleased, always satisfied. Occasionally we patched up and
varnished our reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating
accuracy, by giving some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have
made its dry bones rattle—and then somebody would seize it and sell it
on the fleeting notoriety thus conferred upon it.
There was _nothing_ in the shape of a mining claim that was not salable.
We received presents of “feet” every day. If we needed a hundred dollars
or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would
ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot. I had a trunk about half
full of “stock.” When a claim made a stir in the market and went up to a
high figure, I searched through my pile to see if I had any of its
stock—and generally found it.
The prices rose and fell constantly; but still a fall disturbed us
little, because a thousand dollars a foot was our figure, and so we were
content to let it fluctuate as much as it pleased till it reached it. My
pile of stock was not all given to me by people who wished their claims
“noticed.” At least half of it was given me by persons who had no
thought of such a thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple
verbal “thank you;” and you were not even obliged by law to furnish
that. If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples
in your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a
few. That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the “flush
times.” Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual
_custom_ of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends
without the asking.
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Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a
man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and
binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly
afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted. Mr. Stewart
(Senator, now, from Nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet
of “Justis” stock if I would walk over to his office. It was worth five
or ten dollars a foot. I asked him to make the offer good for next day,
as I was just going to dinner. He said he would not be in town; so I
risked it and took my dinner instead of the stock. Within the week the
price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty,
but nothing could make that man yield. I suppose he sold that stock of
mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket. [My revenge will
be found in the accompanying portrait.] I met three friends one
afternoon, who said they had been buying “Overman” stock at auction at
eight dollars a foot. One said if I would come up to his office he would
give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said
he would do the same. But I was going after an inquest and could not
stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all their “Overman” at six hundred
dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it—and also
to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried
to force on me.
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These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still
confine myself strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave us as
much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five
dollars a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of
offering a guest a cigar. These were “flush times” indeed! I thought
they were going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a
prophet.
To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community,
I will remark that “claims” were actually “located” in excavations for
cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins—and
not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very heart of the city;
and forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the market. It was
small matter who the cellar belonged to—the “ledge” belonged to the
finder, and unless the United States government interfered (inasmuch as
the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble metals in
Nevada—or at least did then), it was considered to be his privilege to
work it. Imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among the costly
shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste the
ground with pick and shovel and blasting powder! It has been often done
in California. In the middle of one of the principal business streets of
Virginia, a man “located” a mining claim and began a shaft on it. He
gave me a hundred feet of the stock and I sold it for a fine suit of
clothes because I was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft and sue
for damages. I owned in another claim that was located in the middle of
another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that “East India”
stock (as it was called) sold briskly although there was an ancient
tunnel running directly under the claim and any man could go into it and
see that it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything that remotely
resembled one.
One plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to “salt” a wild cat claim and
sell out while the excitement was up. The process was simple.
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The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a
wagon load of rich “Comstock” ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft
and piled the rest by its side, above ground. Then he showed the
property to a simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure. Of course
the wagon load of rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his
purchase. A most remarkable case of “salting” was that of the “North
Ophir.” It was claimed that this vein was a “remote extension” of the
original “Ophir,” a valuable mine on the “Comstock.” For a few days
everybody was talking about the rich developments in the North Ophir. It
was said that it yielded perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps. I
went to the place with the owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet
deep, in the bottom of which was a badly shattered vein of dull,
yellowish, unpromising rock. One would as soon expect to find silver in
a grindstone. We got out a pan of the rubbish and washed it in a puddle,
and sure enough, among the sediment we found half a dozen black, bullet-
looking pellets of unimpeachable “native” silver. Nobody had ever heard
of such a thing before; science could not account for such a queer
novelty. The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure
the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan, bought a commanding
interest and prepared to quit the stage once more—he was always doing
that. And then it transpired that the mine had been “salted”—and not in
any hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and
peculiarly original and outrageous fashion. On one of the lumps of
“native” silver was discovered the minted legend, “TED STATES OF,” and
then it was plainly apparent that the mine had been “salted” with melted
half-dollars! The lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they
resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in
the bottom of the shaft. It is literally true. Of course the price of
the stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined. But for
this calamity we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.
CHAPTER XLV.
The “flush times” held bravely on. Something over two years before, Mr.
Goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and
set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of
Virginia. They found the _Territorial Enterprise_, a poverty-stricken
weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die. They bought it,
type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time.
The editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office, bed-
chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment and
it was a small one, too. The editors and printers slept on the floor, a
Chinaman did their cooking, and the “imposing-stone” was the general
dinner table. But now things were changed. The paper was a great daily,
printed by steam; there were five editors and twenty-three compositors;
the subscription price was sixteen dollars a year; the advertising rates
were exorbitant, and the columns crowded. The paper was clearing from
six to ten thousand dollars a month, and the “Enterprise Building” was
finished and ready for occupation—a stately fireproof brick. Every day
from five all the way up to eleven columns of “live” advertisements were
left out or crowded into spasmodic and irregular “supplements.”
The “Gould & Curry” company were erecting a monster hundred-stamp mill
at a cost that ultimately fell little short of a million dollars. Gould
& Curry stock paid heavy dividends—a rare thing, and an experience
confined to the dozen or fifteen claims located on the “main lead,” the
“Comstock.” The Superintendent of the Gould & Curry lived, rent free, in
a fine house built and furnished by the company. He drove a fine pair of
horses which were a present from the company, and his salary was twelve
thousand dollars a year. The superintendent of another of the great
mines traveled in grand state, had a salary of twenty-eight thousand
dollars a year, and in a law suit in after days claimed that he was to
have had one per cent. on the gross yield of the bullion likewise.
Money was wonderfully plenty. The trouble was, not how to get it,—but
how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it. And so it
was a happy thing that just at this juncture the news came over the
wires that a great United States Sanitary Commission had been formed and
money was wanted for the relief of the wounded sailors and soldiers of
the Union languishing in the Eastern hospitals. Right on the heels of it
came word that San Francisco had responded superbly before the telegram
was half a day old. Virginia rose as one man! A Sanitary Committee was
hurriedly organized, and its chairman mounted a vacant cart in C street
and tried to make the clamorous multitude understand that the rest of