ROUGHING IT, Part 3

By Mark Twain

ROUGHING IT, Part 3 1

 Roughing It, Part 3

By Mark Twain 2
 Roughing It, Part 3

By Mark Twain 3
 Roughing It, Part 3

By Mark Twain 4
 Roughing It, Part 3

By Mark Twain 5
 Roughing It, Part 3

PREFATORY.

This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a
record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while
away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. Still, there is information in
the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no
books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person, and saw the happenings of the time
with their own eyes. I allude to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada—a
curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind, that has occurred in the land; and the only
one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it.

Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really
it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of
the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be.
The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim
indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.

THE AUTHOR.

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CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XXI. Alkali Dust—Desolation and Contemplation—Carson
City—Our Journey Ended—We are Introduced to Several Citizens—A
Strange Rebuke—A Washoe Zephyr at Play—Its Office Hours—Governor's
Palace—Government Offices—Our French Landlady Bridget
O'Flannigan—Shadow Secrets—Cause for a Disturbance at Once—The Irish
Brigade—Mrs. O'Flannigan's Boarders—The Surveying Expedition—Escape
of the Tarantulas

CHAPTER XXII. The Son of a Nabob—Start for Lake Tahoe—Splendor of

the Views—Trip on the Lake—Camping Out—Reinvigorating
Climate—Clearing a Tract of Land—Securing a Title—Outhouse and Fences

CHAPTER XXIII. A Happy Life—Lake Tahoe and its

Moods—Transparency of the Waters—A Catastrophe—Fire! Fire!—A
Magnificent Spectacle—Homeless Again—We take to the Lake—A
Storm—Return to Carson

CHAPTER XXIV. Resolve to Buy a Horse—Horsemanship in

Carson—A Temptation—Advice Given Me Freely—I
Buy the Mexican Plug—My First Ride—A Good
Bucker—I Loan the Plug—Experience of
Borrowers—Attempts to Sell—Expense of the
Experiment—A Stranger Taken In

CHAPTER XXV. The Mormons in Nevada—How to Persuade a Loan

from Them—Early History of the Territory—Silver Mines
Discovered—The New Territorial Government—A Foreign
One and a Poor One—Its Funny Struggles for Existence—No
Credit, no Cash—Old Abe Currey Sustains it and its
Officers—Instructions and Vouchers—An Indian's
Endorsement—Toll-Gates

CHAPTER XXVI. The Silver Fever—State of the

Market—Silver Bricks—Tales Told—Off for the
Humboldt Mines

CHAPTER XXVII. Our manner of going—Incidents of the

Trip—A Warm but Too Familiar a Bedfellow—Mr. Ballou
Objects—Sunshine amid Clouds—Safely Arrived

CHAPTER XXVIII. Arrive at the Mountains—Building Our

Cabin—My First Prospecting Tour—My First Gold
Mine—Pockets Filled With Treasures—Filtering the News to
My Companions—The Bubble Pricked—All Not Gold That
Glitters

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CHAPTER XXIX. Out Prospecting—A Silver Mine At

Last—Making a Fortune With Sledge and Drill—A Hard Road
to Travel—We Own in Claims—A Rocky Country

CHAPTER XXX. Disinterested Friends—How "Feet" Were

Sold—We Quit Tunnelling—A Trip to Esmeralda—My
Companions—An Indian Prophesy—A Flood—Our
Quarters During It

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
79. CONTEMPLATION
80. THE WASHOE ZEPHYR
81. THE GOVERNOR'S HOUSE
82. DARK DISCLOSURES
83. THE IRISH BRIGADE
84. RECREATION
85. THE TARANTULA
86. LIGHT THROWN ON THE SUBJECT
87. I STEERED
88. THE INVALID
89. THE RESTORED
90. OUR HOUSE
91. AT BUSINESS
92. FIGHT AT LAKE TAHOE
93. "THINK HIM AN AMERICAN HORSE"
94. UNEXPECTED ELEVATION
95. UNIVERSALLY UNSETTLED
96. RIDING THE PLUG
97. WANTED EXERCISE
98. BORROWING MADE EASY
99. FREE RIDES
100. SATISFACTORY VOUCHERS
101. NEEDS PRAYING FOR
102. MAP OF TOLL ROADS
103. UNLOADING SILVER BRICKS
104. VIEW IN HUMBOLDT MOUNTAINS
105. GOING TO HUMBOLDT
106. BALLOU'S BEDFELLOW
107. PLEASURES OF CAMPING OUT
108. THE SECRET SEARCH
109. "CAST YOUR EYE ON THAT ...
110. "WE'VE GOT IT"
111. INCIPIENT MILLIONAIRES
112. ROCKS-TAIL-PIECE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 8
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113. "DO YOU SEE IT?"

114. FAREWELL SWEET RIVER
115. THE RESCUE

CHAPTER XXI.

We were approaching the end of our long journey. It was the morning of the twentieth day. At noon we would
reach Carson City, the capital of Nevada Territory. We were not glad, but sorry. It had been a fine pleasure
trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so
the idea of coming to a stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable,
but on the contrary depressing.

Visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad mountains. There was not a tree in sight.
There was no vegetation but the endless sage-brush and greasewood. All nature was gray with it. We were
plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated across the plain like
smoke from a burning house.

We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the mail-bags, the driver—we and
the sage-brush and the other scenery were all one monotonous color. Long trains of freight wagons in the
distance envelope in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of prairies on fire. These teams and their
masters were the only life we saw. Otherwise we moved in the midst of solitude, silence and desolation. Every
twenty steps we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of burthen, with its dust-coated skin stretched tightly
over its empty ribs. Frequently a solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and contemplated the passing
coach with meditative serenity.

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By and by Carson City was pointed out to us. It nestled in the edge of a great plain and was a sufficient
number of miles away to look like an assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a grim range of
mountains overlooking it, whose summits seemed lifted clear out of companionship and consciousness of
earthly things.

We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on. It was a "wooden" town; its population two thousand souls.
The main street consisted of four or five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit down
on, but not too high for various other purposes; in fact, hardly high enough. They were packed close together,
side by side, as if room were scarce in that mighty plain.

The sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and inclined to rattle when walked upon. In the
middle of the town, opposite the stores, was the "plaza" which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky
Mountains—a large, unfenced, level vacancy, with a liberty pole in it, and very useful as a place for
public auctions, horse trades, and mass meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of
the plaza were faced by stores, offices and stables.

The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering.

We were introduced to several citizens, at the stage-office and on the way up to the Governor's from the
hotel—among others, to a Mr. Harris, who was on horseback; he began to say something, but
interrupted himself with the remark:

"I'll have to get you to excuse me a minute; yonder is the witness that swore I helped to rob the California
coach—a piece of impertinent intermeddling, sir, for I am not even acquainted with the man."

Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter, and the stranger began to explain with
another. When the pistols were emptied, the stranger resumed his work (mending a whip-lash), and Mr. Harris
rode by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through one of his lungs, and several in his hips;
and from them issued little rivulets of blood that coursed down the horse's sides and made the animal look
quite picturesque. I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it recalled to mind that first day in Carson.

This was all we saw that day, for it was two o'clock, now, and according to custom the daily "Washoe
Zephyr" set in; a soaring dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it, and the

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capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view.

Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting to new comers; for the vast dust cloud
was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air—things living and dead, that flitted hither and
thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust—hats,
chickens and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade
lower; door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats
and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down
only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots.

It was something to see that much. I could have seen more, if I could have kept the dust out of my eyes.

But seriously a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter. It blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs
occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stage coach over and spills the
passengers; and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people there, is, that the wind blows the hair

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off their heads while they are looking skyward after their hats. Carson streets seldom look inactive on Summer
afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around their escaping hats, like chambermaids trying
to head off a spider.

The "Washoe Zephyr" (Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada) is a peculiar Scriptural wind, in that no man
knoweth "whence it cometh." That is to say, where it originates. It comes right over the mountains from the
West, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find any of it on the other side! It probably is manufactured
on the mountain-top for the occasion, and starts from there. It is a pretty regular wind, in the summer time. Its
office hours are from two in the afternoon till two the next morning; and anybody venturing abroad during
those twelve hours needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile or two to leeward of the point he is
aiming at. And yet the first complaint a Washoe visitor to San Francisco makes, is that the sea winds blow so,
there! There is a good deal of human nature in that.

We found the state palace of the Governor of Nevada Territory to consist of a white frame one-story house
with two small rooms in it and a stanchion supported shed in front—for grandeur—it compelled
the respect of the citizen and inspired the Indians with awe. The newly arrived Chief and Associate Justices of
the Territory, and other machinery of the government, were domiciled with less splendor. They were boarding
around privately, and had their offices in their bedrooms.

The Secretary and I took quarters in the "ranch" of a worthy French lady by the name of Bridget O'Flannigan,
a camp follower of his Excellency the Governor. She had known him in his prosperity as commander-in-chief

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of the Metropolitan Police of New York, and she would not desert him in his adversity as Governor of
Nevada.

Our room was on the lower floor, facing the plaza, and when we had got our bed, a small table, two chairs, the
government fire-proof safe, and the Unabridged Dictionary into it, there was still room enough left for a
visitor—may be two, but not without straining the walls. But the walls could stand it—at least
the partitions could, for they consisted simply of one thickness of white "cotton domestic" stretched from
corner to corner of the room. This was the rule in Carson—any other kind of partition was the rare
exception. And if you stood in a dark room and your neighbors in the next had lights, the shadows on your
canvas told queer secrets sometimes! Very often these partitions were made of old flour sacks basted together;
and then the difference between the common herd and the aristocracy was, that the common herd had
unornamented sacks, while the walls of the aristocrat were overpowering with rudimental fresco—i.e.,
red and blue mill brands on the flour sacks.

Occasionally, also, the better classes embellished their canvas by pasting pictures from Harper's Weekly on
them. In many cases, too, the wealthy and the cultured rose to spittoons and other evidences of a sumptuous
and luxurious taste. [Washoe people take a joke so hard that I must explain that the above description was
only the rule; there were many honorable exceptions in Carson—plastered ceilings and houses that had
considerable furniture in them.—M. T.]

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We had a carpet and a genuine queen's-ware washbowl. Consequently we were hated without reserve by the
other tenants of the O'Flannigan "ranch." When we added a painted oilcloth window curtain, we simply took
our lives into our own hands. To prevent bloodshed I removed up stairs and took up quarters with the untitled
plebeians in one of the fourteen white pine cot-bedsteads that stood in two long ranks in the one sole room of
which the second story consisted.

It was a jolly company, the fourteen. They were principally voluntary camp-followers of the Governor, who
had joined his retinue by their own election at New York and San Francisco and came along, feeling that in
the scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could not make their condition more precarious than it
was, and might reasonably expect to make it better. They were popularly known as the "Irish Brigade," though
there were only four or five Irishmen among all the Governor's retainers.

His good-natured Excellency was much annoyed at the gossip his henchmen created—especially when
there arose a rumor that they were paid assassins of his, brought along to quietly reduce the democratic vote
when desirable!

Mrs. O'Flannigan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars a week apiece, and they were cheerfully
giving their notes for it. They were perfectly satisfied, but Bridget presently found that notes that could not be

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discounted were but a feeble constitution for a Carson boarding- house. So she began to harry the Governor to
find employment for the "Brigade." Her importunities and theirs together drove him to a gentle desperation at
last, and he finally summoned the Brigade to the presence. Then, said he:

"Gentlemen, I have planned a lucrative and useful service for you—a service which will provide you
with recreation amid noble landscapes, and afford you never ceasing opportunities for enriching your minds
by observation and study. I want you to survey a railroad from Carson City westward to a certain point! When
the legislature meets I will have the necessary bill passed and the remuneration arranged."

"What, a railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains?"

"Well, then, survey it eastward to a certain point!"

He converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers and so on, and turned them loose in the desert. It was
"recreation" with a vengeance! Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a sultry
sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas.

"Romantic adventure" could go no further. They surveyed very slowly, very deliberately, very carefully. They
returned every night during the first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly. They brought in
great store of prodigious hairy spiders—tarantulas—and imprisoned them in covered tumblers
up stairs in the "ranch." After the first week, they had to camp on the field, for they were getting well
eastward. They made a good many inquiries as to the location of that indefinite "certain point," but got no
information. At last, to a peculiarly urgent inquiry of "How far eastward?" Governor Nye telegraphed back:

"To the Atlantic Ocean, blast you!—and then bridge it and go on!"

This brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and ceased from their labors. The Governor was
always comfortable about it; he said Mrs. O'Flannigan would hold him for the Brigade's board anyhow, and he
intended to get what entertainment he could out of the boys; he said, with his old-time pleasant twinkle, that
he meant to survey them into Utah and then telegraph Brigham to hang them for trespass!

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The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite a menagerie arranged along the
shelves of the room. Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular
legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest-looking
desperadoes the animal world can furnish. If their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were
up and spoiling for a fight in a minute. Starchy?—proud? Indeed, they would take up a straw and pick
their teeth like a member of Congress. There was as usual a furious "zephyr" blowing the first night of the
brigade's return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew off, and a corner of it came crashing
through the side of our ranch. There was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in
the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow aisle between the bedrows. In
the midst of the turmoil, Bob H——sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf
with his head. Instantly he shouted:

"Turn out, boys—the tarantulas is loose!"

No warning ever sounded so dreadful. Nobody tried, any longer, to leave the room, lest he might step on a
tarantula. Every man groped for a trunk or a bed, and jumped on it. Then followed the strangest
silence—a silence of grisly suspense it was, too—waiting, expectancy, fear. It was as dark as
pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and
beds, for not a thing could be seen. Then came occasional little interruptions of the silence, and one could
recognize a man and tell his locality by his voice, or locate any other sound a sufferer made by his gropings or
changes of position. The occasional voices were not given to much speaking—you simply heard a
gentle ejaculation of "Ow!" followed by a solid thump, and you knew the gentleman had felt a hairy blanket
or something touch his bare skin and had skipped from a bed to the floor. Another silence. Presently you
would hear a gasping voice say:

"Su—su—something's crawling up the back of my neck!"

Every now and then you could hear a little subdued scramble and a sorrowful "O Lord!" and then you knew
that somebody was getting away from something he took for a tarantula, and not losing any time about it,
either. Directly a voice in the corner rang out wild and clear:

"I've got him! I've got him!" [Pause, and probable change of circumstances.] "No, he's got me! Oh, ain't they
never going to fetch a lantern!"

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The lantern came at that moment, in the hands of Mrs. O'Flannigan, whose anxiety to know the amount of
damage done by the assaulting roof had not prevented her waiting a judicious interval, after getting out of bed
and lighting up, to see if the wind was done, now, up stairs, or had a larger contract.

The landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room was picturesque, and might have been funny
to some people, but was not to us. Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks and beds, and
so strangely attired, too, we were too earnestly distressed and too genuinely miserable to see any fun about it,
and there was not the semblance of a smile anywhere visible. I know I am not capable of suffering more than I
did during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those creeping, bloody-minded
tarantulas. I had skipped from bed to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every time I touched
anything that was furzy I fancied I felt the fangs. I had rather go to war than live that episode over again.
Nobody was hurt. The man who thought a tarantula had "got him" was mistaken—only a crack in a box
had caught his finger. Not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. There were ten or twelve of
them. We took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success. Did we go back to
bed then? We did nothing of the kind. Money could not have persuaded us to do it. We sat up the rest of the
night playing cribbage and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy.

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CHAPTER XXII.

It was the end of August, and the skies were cloudless and the weather superb. In two or three weeks I had
grown wonderfully fascinated with the curious new country and concluded to put off my return to "the States"
awhile. I had grown well accustomed to wearing a damaged slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, and pants crammed
into boot-tops, and gloried in the absence of coat, vest and braces. I felt rowdyish and "bully," (as the historian
Josephus phrases it, in his fine chapter upon the destruction of the Temple). It seemed to me that nothing
could be so fine and so romantic. I had become an officer of the government, but that was for mere sublimity.
The office was an unique sinecure. I had nothing to do and no salary. I was private Secretary to his majesty
the Secretary and there was not yet writing enough for two of us. So Johnny K——and I devoted
our time to amusement. He was the young son of an Ohio nabob and was out there for recreation. He got it.
We had heard a world of talk about the marvellous beauty of Lake Tahoe, and finally curiosity drove us
thither to see it. Three or four members of the Brigade had been there and located some timber lands on its
shores and stored up a quantity of provisions in their camp. We strapped a couple of blankets on our shoulders
and took an axe apiece and started—for we intended to take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and
become wealthy. We were on foot. The reader will find it advantageous to go horseback. We were told that
the distance was eleven miles. We tramped a long time on level ground, and then toiled laboriously up a
mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over. No lake there. We descended on the other side,
crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked
over again. No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to curse those
people who had beguiled us. Thus refreshed, we presently resumed the march with renewed vigor and
determination. We plodded on, two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us—a noble
sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of
snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still! It was a vast oval, and one
would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay there with the shadows
of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture
the whole earth affords.

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We found the small skiff belonging to the Brigade boys, and without loss of time set out across a deep bend of
the lake toward the landmarks that signified the locality of the camp. I got Johnny to row—not because
I mind exertion myself, but because it makes me sick to ride backwards when I am at work. But I steered. A
three-mile pull brought us to the camp just as the night fell, and we stepped ashore very tired and wolfishly
hungry. In a "cache" among the rocks we found the provisions and the cooking utensils, and then, all fatigued
as I was, I sat down on a boulder and superintended while Johnny gathered wood and cooked supper. Many a
man who had gone through what I had, would have wanted to rest.

It was a delicious supper—hot bread, fried bacon, and black coffee. It was a delicious solitude we were
in, too. Three miles away was a saw- mill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings
throughout the wide circumference of the lake. As the darkness closed down and the stars came out and
spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and
our pains. In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand between two large boulders and soon feel
asleep, careless of the procession of ants that passed in through rents in our clothing and explored our persons.
Nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us, for it had been fairly earned, and if our consciences had any
sins on them they had to adjourn court for that night, any way. The wind rose just as we were losing
consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf upon the shore.

It is always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had plenty of blankets and were warm enough.

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We never moved a muscle all night, but waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once,
thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness. There is no end of wholesome medicine
in such an experience. That morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day
before—sick ones at any rate. But the world is slow, and people will go to "water cures" and
"movement cures" and to foreign lands for health. Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an
Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and
driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones. The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing
and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?—it is the same the angels breathe. I think that hardly any
amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side.
Not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer time. I know a man who
went there to die. But he made a failure of it. He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand. He
had no appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future. Three months later he was sleeping
out of doors regularly, eating all he could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three
thousand feet high for recreation. And he was a skeleton no longer, but weighed part of a ton. This is no fancy
sketch, but the truth. His disease was consumption. I confidently commend his experience to other skeletons.

I superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in the boat and skirted along the lake
shore about three miles and disembarked. We liked the appearance of the place, and so we claimed some three
hundred acres of it and stuck our "notices" on a tree. It was yellow pine timber land—a dense forest of
trees a hundred feet high and from one to five feet through at the butt. It was necessary to fence our property
or we could not hold it. That is to say, it was necessary to cut down trees here and there and make them fall in

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such a way as to form a sort of enclosure (with pretty wide gaps in it). We cut down three trees apiece, and
found it such heart-breaking work that we decided to "rest our case" on those; if they held the property, well
and good; if they didn't, let the property spill out through the gaps and go; it was no use to work ourselves to
death merely to save a few acres of land. Next day we came back to build a house—for a house was
also necessary, in order to hold the property.

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We decided to build a substantial log- house and excite the envy of the Brigade boys; but by the time we had

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cut and trimmed the first log it seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate, and so we concluded to build it of
saplings. However, two saplings, duly cut and trimmed, compelled recognition of the fact that a still modester
architecture would satisfy the law, and so we concluded to build a "brush" house. We devoted the next day to
this work, but we did so much "sitting around" and discussing, that by the middle of the afternoon we had
achieved only a half-way sort of affair which one of us had to watch while the other cut brush, lest if both
turned our backs we might not be able to find it again, it had such a strong family resemblance to the
surrounding vegetation. But we were satisfied with it.

We were land owners now, duly seized and possessed, and within the protection of the law. Therefore we
decided to take up our residence on our own domain and enjoy that large sense of independence which only
such an experience can bring. Late the next afternoon, after a good long rest, we sailed away from the Brigade
camp with all the provisions and cooking utensils we could carry off—borrow is the more accurate
word—and just as the night was falling we beached the boat at our own landing.

CHAPTER XXIII.

If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch for the next two or three weeks, it
must be a sort of life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person. We did not see a human
being but ourselves during the time, or hear any sounds but those that were made by the wind and the waves,
the sighing of the pines, and now and then the far-off thunder of an avalanche. The forest about us was dense
and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and
clear, or rippled and breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to Nature's mood; and its circling border of
mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred with land-slides, cloven by canons and valleys, and helmeted
with glittering snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture. The view was always fascinating,
bewitching, entrancing. The eye was never tired of gazing, night or day, in calm or storm; it suffered but one
grief, and that was that it could not look always, but must close sometimes in sleep.

We slept in the sand close to the water's edge, between two protecting boulders, which took care of the stormy
night-winds for us. We never took any paregoric to make us sleep. At the first break of dawn we were always
up and running foot-races to tone down excess of physical vigor and exuberance of spirits. That is, Johnny
was—but I held his hat. While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks
put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set
the captive crags and forests free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every
little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter
complete. Then to "business."

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That is, drifting around in the boat. We were on the north shore. There, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes
gray, sometimes white. This gives the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage than it has
elsewhere on the lake. We usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from shore, and then lay down on the
thwarts, in the sun, and let the boat drift by the hour whither it would. We seldom talked. It interrupted the
Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the luxurious rest and indolence brought. The shore all along was
indented with deep, curved bays and coves, bordered by narrow sand-beaches; and where the sand ended, the
steep mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space—rose up like a vast wall a little out of the
perpendicular, and thickly wooded with tall pines.

So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly
distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep. Every little pebble
was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's- breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite
boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly
to the surface, till presently it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to seize an oar
and avert the danger. But the boat would float on, and the boulder descend again, and then we could see that
when we had been exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the surface. Down
through the transparency of these great depths, the water was not merely transparent, but dazzlingly,

CHAPTER XXIII. 24
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brilliantly so. All objects seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but of every
minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply through the same depth of atmosphere. So
empty and airy did all spaces seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in
mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions "balloon-voyages."

We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a week. We could see trout by the thousand winging
about in the emptiness under us, or sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but they would not bite—they
could see the line too plainly, perhaps. We frequently selected the trout we wanted, and rested the bait
patiently and persistently on the end of his nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he would only shake it off with
an annoyed manner, and shift his position.

We bathed occasionally, but the water was rather chilly, for all it looked so sunny. Sometimes we rowed out
to the "blue water," a mile or two from shore. It was as dead blue as indigo there, because of the immense
depth. By official measurement the lake in its centre is one thousand five hundred and twenty-five feet deep!

Sometimes, on lazy afternoons, we lolled on the sand in camp, and smoked pipes and read some old
well-worn novels. At night, by the camp-fire, we played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the
mind—and played them with cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer's acquaintance
with them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of diamonds.

We never slept in our "house." It never recurred to us, for one thing; and besides, it was built to hold the
ground, and that was enough. We did not wish to strain it.

By and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back to the old camp and laid in a new supply. We
were gone all day, and reached home again about night-fall, pretty tired and hungry. While Johnny was
carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our "house" for future use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices
of bacon, and the coffee-pot, ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to get the
frying-pan. While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny, and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping
all over the premises! Johnny was on the other side of it. He had to run through the flames to get to the lake
shore, and then we stood helpless and watched the devastation.

The ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine-needles, and the fire touched them off as if they were
gunpowder. It was wonderful to see with what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled! My coffee-pot was
gone, and everything with it. In a minute and a half the fire seized upon a dense growth of dry manzanita
chapparal six or eight feet high, and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific. We
were driven to the boat by the intense heat, and there we remained, spell-bound.

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CHAPTER XXIII. 26
 Roughing It, Part 3

Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame! It went surging up adjacent
ridges—surmounted them and disappeared in the canons beyond—burst into view upon higher
and farther ridges, presently—shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again—flamed out
again, directly, higher and still higher up the mountain-side- -threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and
there, and sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and gorges, till as far
as the eye could reach the lofty mountain-fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava
streams. Away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy glare, and the firmament above was
a reflected hell!

Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake! Both pictures were sublime,
both were beautiful; but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held it
with the stronger fascination.

We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours. We never thought of supper, and never felt fatigue.
But at eleven o'clock the conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision, and then darkness stole down
upon the landscape again.

Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat. The provisions were all cooked, no doubt, but we did
not go to see. We were homeless wanderers again, without any property. Our fence was gone, our house
burned down; no insurance. Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead trees all burned up, and our broad
acres of manzanita swept away. Our blankets were on our usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and
went to sleep. The next morning we started back to the old camp, but while out a long way from shore, so
great a storm came up that we dared not try to land. So I baled out the seas we shipped, and Johnny pulled
heavily through the billows till we had reached a point three or four miles beyond the camp. The storm was
increasing, and it became evident that it was better to take the hazard of beaching the boat than go down in a
hundred fathoms of water; so we ran in, with tall white-caps following, and I sat down in the stern-sheets and
pointed her head-on to the shore. The instant the bow struck, a wave came over the stern that washed crew and
cargo ashore, and saved a deal of trouble. We shivered in the lee of a boulder all the rest of the day, and froze
all the night through. In the morning the tempest had gone down, and we paddled down to the camp without
any unnecessary delay. We were so starved that we ate up the rest of the Brigade's provisions, and then set out
to Carson to tell them about it and ask their forgiveness. It was accorded, upon payment of damages.

We made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a hair-breadth escape and blood-curdling adventure
which will never be recorded in any history.

CHAPTER XXIV.

I resolved to have a horse to ride. I had never seen such wild, free, magnificent horsemanship outside of a
circus as these picturesquely-clad Mexicans, Californians and Mexicanized Americans displayed in Carson
streets every day. How they rode! Leaning just gently forward out of the perpendicular, easy and nonchalant,

CHAPTER XXIV. 27
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with broad slouch-hat brim blown square up in front, and long riata swinging above the head, they swept
through the town like the wind! The next minute they were only a sailing puff of dust on the far desert. If they
trotted, they sat up gallantly and gracefully, and seemed part of the horse; did not go jiggering up and down
after the silly Miss-Nancy fashion of the riding-schools. I had quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow, and
was full of anxiety to learn more. I was resolved to buy a horse.

While the thought was rankling in my mind, the auctioneer came skurrying through the plaza on a black beast
that had as many humps and corners on him as a dromedary, and was necessarily uncomely; but he was
"going, going, at twenty-two!—horse, saddle and bridle at twenty-two dollars, gentlemen!" and I could
hardly resist.

A man whom I did not know (he turned out to be the auctioneer's brother) noticed the wistful look in my eye,
and observed that that was a very remarkable horse to be going at such a price; and added that the saddle
alone was worth the money. It was a Spanish saddle, with ponderous 'tapidaros', and furnished with the
ungainly sole-leather covering with the unspellable name. I said I had half a notion to bid. Then this
keen-eyed person appeared to me to be "taking my measure"; but I dismissed the suspicion when he spoke, for
his manner was full of guileless candor and truthfulness. Said he:

"I know that horse—know him well. You are a stranger, I take it, and so you might think he was an
American horse, maybe, but I assure you he is not. He is nothing of the kind; but—excuse my speaking
in a low voice, other people being near—he is, without the shadow of a doubt, a Genuine Mexican
Plug!"

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I did not know what a Genuine Mexican Plug was, but there was something about this man's way of saying it,
that made me swear inwardly that I would own a Genuine Mexican Plug, or die.

"Has he any other—er—advantages?" I inquired, suppressing what eagerness I could.

He hooked his forefinger in the pocket of my army-shirt, led me to one side, and breathed in my ear
impressively these words:

"He can out-buck anything in America!"

"Going, going, going—at twent—ty—four dollars and a half, gen—"

"Twenty-seven!" I shouted, in a frenzy.

"And sold!" said the auctioneer, and passed over the Genuine Mexican Plug to me.

I could scarcely contain my exultation. I paid the money, and put the animal in a neighboring livery-stable to
dine and rest himself.

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 Roughing It, Part 3
In the afternoon I brought the creature into the plaza, and certain citizens held him by the head, and others by
the tail, while I mounted him. As soon as they let go, he placed all his feet in a bunch together, lowered his
back, and then suddenly arched it upward, and shot me straight into the air a matter of three or four feet! I
came as straight down again, lit in the saddle, went instantly up again, came down almost on the high
pommel, shot up again, and came down on the horse's neck—all in the space of three or four seconds.
Then he rose and stood almost straight up on his hind feet, and I, clasping his lean neck desperately, slid back
into the saddle and held on. He came down, and immediately hoisted his heels into the air, delivering a
vicious kick at the sky, and stood on his forefeet. And then down he came once more, and began the original
exercise of shooting me straight up again. The third time I went up I heard a stranger say:

"Oh, don't he buck, though!"

While I was up, somebody struck the horse a sounding thwack with a leathern strap, and when I arrived again
the Genuine Mexican Plug was not there. A California youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if he
might have a ride. I granted him that luxury. He mounted the Genuine, got lifted into the air once, but sent his
spurs home as he descended, and the horse darted away like a telegram. He soared over three fences like a
bird, and disappeared down the road toward the Washoe Valley.

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 Roughing It, Part 3
I sat down on a stone, with a sigh, and by a natural impulse one of my hands sought my forehead, and the
other the base of my stomach. I believe I never appreciated, till then, the poverty of the human
machinery—for I still needed a hand or two to place elsewhere. Pen cannot describe how I was jolted
up. Imagination cannot conceive how disjointed I was—how internally, externally and universally I
was unsettled, mixed up and ruptured. There was a sympathetic crowd around me, though.

One elderly-looking comforter said:

"Stranger, you've been taken in. Everybody in this camp knows that horse. Any child, any Injun, could have
told you that he'd buck; he is the very worst devil to buck on the continent of America. You hear me. I'm
Curry. Old Curry. Old Abe Curry. And moreover, he is a simon-pure, out-and-out, genuine d—d
Mexican plug, and an uncommon mean one at that, too. Why, you turnip, if you had laid low and kept dark,
there's chances to buy an American horse for mighty little more than you paid for that bloody old foreign
relic."

I gave no sign; but I made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's funeral took place while I was in the
Territory I would postpone all other recreations and attend it.

After a gallop of sixteen miles the Californian youth and the Genuine Mexican Plug came tearing into town
again, shedding foam-flakes like the spume-spray that drives before a typhoon, and, with one final skip over a
wheelbarrow and a Chinaman, cast anchor in front of the "ranch."

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 Roughing It, Part 3

Such panting and blowing! Such spreading and contracting of the red equine nostrils, and glaring of the wild
equine eye! But was the imperial beast subjugated? Indeed he was not.

His lordship the Speaker of the House thought he was, and mounted him to go down to the Capitol; but the
first dash the creature made was over a pile of telegraph poles half as high as a church; and his time to the
Capitol—one mile and three quarters—remains unbeaten to this day. But then he took an
advantage—he left out the mile, and only did the three quarters. That is to say, he made a straight cut
across lots, preferring fences and ditches to a crooked road; and when the Speaker got to the Capitol he said
he had been in the air so much he felt as if he had made the trip on a comet.

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 Roughing It, Part 3

In the evening the Speaker came home afoot for exercise, and got the Genuine towed back behind a quartz
wagon. The next day I loaned the animal to the Clerk of the House to go down to the Dana silver mine, six
miles, and he walked back for exercise, and got the horse towed. Everybody I loaned him to always walked
back; they never could get enough exercise any other way.

Still, I continued to loan him to anybody who was willing to borrow him, my idea being to get him crippled,
and throw him on the borrower's hands, or killed, and make the borrower pay for him. But somehow nothing
ever happened to him. He took chances that no other horse ever took and survived, but he always came out
safe. It was his daily habit to try experiments that had always before been considered impossible, but he
always got through. Sometimes he miscalculated a little, and did not get his rider through intact, but he always
got through himself. Of course I had tried to sell him; but that was a stretch of simplicity which met with little
sympathy. The auctioneer stormed up and down the streets on him for four days, dispersing the populace,
interrupting business, and destroying children, and never got a bid—at least never any but the
eighteen-dollar one he hired a notoriously substanceless bummer to make. The people only smiled pleasantly,
and restrained their desire to buy, if they had any. Then the auctioneer brought in his bill, and I withdrew the
horse from the market. We tried to trade him off at private vendue next, offering him at a sacrifice for
second-hand tombstones, old iron, temperance tracts—any kind of property. But holders were stiff, and
we retired from the market again. I never tried to ride the horse any more. Walking was good enough exercise
for a man like me, that had nothing the matter with him except ruptures, internal injuries, and such things.
Finally I tried to give him away. But it was a failure. Parties said earthquakes were handy enough on the

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 Roughing It, Part 3
Pacific coast—they did not wish to own one. As a last resort I offered him to the Governor for the use
of the "Brigade." His face lit up eagerly at first, but toned down again, and he said the thing would be too
palpable.

Just then the livery stable man brought in his bill for six weeks' keeping—stall-room for the horse,
fifteen dollars; hay for the horse, two hundred and fifty! The Genuine Mexican Plug had eaten a ton of the
article, and the man said he would have eaten a hundred if he had let him.

I will remark here, in all seriousness, that the regular price of hay during that year and a part of the next was
really two hundred and fifty dollars a ton. During a part of the previous year it had sold at five hundred a ton,
in gold, and during the winter before that there was such scarcity of the article that in several instances small
quantities had brought eight hundred dollars a ton in coin! The consequence might be guessed without my
telling it: peopled turned their stock loose to starve, and before the spring arrived Carson and Eagle valleys
were almost literally carpeted with their carcases! Any old settler there will verify these statements.

I managed to pay the livery bill, and that same day I gave the Genuine Mexican Plug to a passing Arkansas
emigrant whom fortune delivered into my hand. If this ever meets his eye, he will doubtless remember the
donation.

Now whoever has had the luck to ride a real Mexican plug will recognize the animal depicted in this chapter,
and hardly consider him exaggerated—but the uninitiated will feel justified in regarding his portrait as
a fancy sketch, perhaps.

CHAPTER XXV.

Originally, Nevada was a part of Utah and was called Carson county; and a pretty large county it was, too.
Certain of its valleys produced no end of hay, and this attracted small colonies of Mormon stock-raisers and
farmers to them. A few orthodox Americans straggled in from California, but no love was lost between the
two classes of colonists. There was little or no friendly intercourse; each party staid to itself. The Mormons
were largely in the majority, and had the additional advantage of being peculiarly under the protection of the
Mormon government of the Territory. Therefore they could afford to be distant, and even peremptory toward
their neighbors. One of the traditions of Carson Valley illustrates the condition of things that prevailed at the
time I speak of. The hired girl of one of the American families was Irish, and a Catholic; yet it was noted with
surprise that she was the only person outside of the Mormon ring who could get favors from the Mormons.
She asked kindnesses of them often, and always got them. It was a mystery to everybody. But one day as she
was passing out at the door, a large bowie knife dropped from under her apron, and when her mistress asked
for an explanation she observed that she was going out to "borry a wash-tub from the Mormons!"

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 Roughing It, Part 3

In 1858 silver lodes were discovered in "Carson County," and then the aspect of things changed. Californians
began to flock in, and the American element was soon in the majority. Allegiance to Brigham Young and
Utah was renounced, and a temporary territorial government for "Washoe" was instituted by the citizens.
Governor Roop was the first and only chief magistrate of it. In due course of time Congress passed a bill to
organize "Nevada Territory," and President Lincoln sent out Governor Nye to supplant Roop.

At this time the population of the Territory was about twelve or fifteen thousand, and rapidly increasing.
Silver mines were being vigorously developed and silver mills erected. Business of all kinds was active and
prosperous and growing more so day by day.

The people were glad to have a legitimately constituted government, but did not particularly enjoy having
strangers from distant States put in authority over them—a sentiment that was natural enough. They
thought the officials should have been chosen from among themselves from among prominent citizens who

CHAPTER XXV. 35
 Roughing It, Part 3
had earned a right to such promotion, and who would be in sympathy with the populace and likewise
thoroughly acquainted with the needs of the Territory. They were right in viewing the matter thus, without
doubt. The new officers were "emigrants," and that was no title to anybody's affection or admiration either.

The new government was received with considerable coolness. It was not only a foreign intruder, but a poor
one. It was not even worth plucking—except by the smallest of small fry office-seekers and such.
Everybody knew that Congress had appropriated only twenty thousand dollars a year in greenbacks for its
support—about money enough to run a quartz mill a month. And everybody knew, also, that the first
year's money was still in Washington, and that the getting hold of it would be a tedious and difficult process.
Carson City was too wary and too wise to open up a credit account with the imported bantling with anything
like indecent haste.

There is something solemnly funny about the struggles of a new-born Territorial government to get a start in
this world. Ours had a trying time of it. The Organic Act and the "instructions" from the State Department
commanded that a legislature should be elected at such-and- such a time, and its sittings inaugurated at
such-and-such a date. It was easy to get legislators, even at three dollars a day, although board was four
dollars and fifty cents, for distinction has its charm in Nevada as well as elsewhere, and there were plenty of
patriotic souls out of employment; but to get a legislative hall for them to meet in was another matter
altogether. Carson blandly declined to give a room rent-free, or let one to the government on credit.

But when Curry heard of the difficulty, he came forward, solitary and alone, and shouldered the Ship of State
over the bar and got her afloat again. I refer to "Curry—Old Curry—Old Abe Curry." But for
him the legislature would have been obliged to sit in the desert. He offered his large stone building just
outside the capital limits, rent-free, and it was gladly accepted. Then he built a horse-railroad from town to the
capitol, and carried the legislators gratis.

He also furnished pine benches and chairs for the legislature, and covered the floors with clean saw-dust by
way of carpet and spittoon combined. But for Curry the government would have died in its tender infancy. A
canvas partition to separate the Senate from the House of Representatives was put up by the Secretary, at a
cost of three dollars and forty cents, but the United States declined to pay for it. Upon being reminded that the
"instructions" permitted the payment of a liberal rent for a legislative hall, and that that money was saved to
the country by Mr. Curry's generosity, the United States said that did not alter the matter, and the three dollars
and forty cents would be subtracted from the Secretary's eighteen hundred dollar salary—and it was!

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 Roughing It, Part 3

The matter of printing was from the beginning an interesting feature of the new government's difficulties. The
Secretary was sworn to obey his volume of written "instructions," and these commanded him to do two certain
things without fail, viz.:

1. Get the House and Senate journals printed; and, 2. For this work, pay one dollar and fifty cents per
"thousand" for composition, and one dollar and fifty cents per "token" for press-work, in greenbacks.

It was easy to swear to do these two things, but it was entirely impossible to do more than one of them. When
greenbacks had gone down to forty cents on the dollar, the prices regularly charged everybody by printing
establishments were one dollar and fifty cents per "thousand" and one dollar and fifty cents per "token," in
gold. The "instructions" commanded that the Secretary regard a paper dollar issued by the government as
equal to any other dollar issued by the government. Hence the printing of the journals was discontinued. Then
the United States sternly rebuked the Secretary for disregarding the "instructions," and warned him to correct
his ways. Wherefore he got some printing done, forwarded the bill to Washington with full exhibits of the
high prices of things in the Territory, and called attention to a printed market report wherein it would be
observed that even hay was two hundred and fifty dollars a ton. The United States responded by subtracting
the printing- bill from the Secretary's suffering salary—and moreover remarked with dense gravity that
he would find nothing in his "instructions" requiring him to purchase hay!

Nothing in this world is palled in such impenetrable obscurity as a U.S. Treasury Comptroller's understanding.
The very fires of the hereafter could get up nothing more than a fitful glimmer in it. In the days I speak of he
never could be made to comprehend why it was that twenty thousand dollars would not go as far in Nevada,
where all commodities ranged at an enormous figure, as it would in the other Territories, where exceeding
cheapness was the rule. He was an officer who looked out for the little expenses all the time. The Secretary of
the Territory kept his office in his bedroom, as I before remarked; and he charged the United States no rent,
although his "instructions" provided for that item and he could have justly taken advantage of it (a thing which
I would have done with more than lightning promptness if I had been Secretary myself). But the United States
never applauded this devotion. Indeed, I think my country was ashamed to have so improvident a person in its
employ.

Those "instructions" (we used to read a chapter from them every morning, as intellectual gymnastics, and a
couple of chapters in Sunday school every Sabbath, for they treated of all subjects under the sun and had
much valuable religious matter in them along with the other statistics) those "instructions" commanded that
pen-knives, envelopes, pens and writing-paper be furnished the members of the legislature. So the Secretary
made the purchase and the distribution. The knives cost three dollars apiece. There was one too many, and the
Secretary gave it to the Clerk of the House of Representatives. The United States said the Clerk of the House
was not a "member" of the legislature, and took that three dollars out of the Secretary's salary, as usual.

White men charged three or four dollars a "load" for sawing up stove- wood. The Secretary was sagacious
enough to know that the United States would never pay any such price as that; so he got an Indian to saw up a
load of office wood at one dollar and a half. He made out the usual voucher, but signed no name to
it—simply appended a note explaining that an Indian had done the work, and had done it in a very
capable and satisfactory way, but could not sign the voucher owing to lack of ability in the necessary
direction. The Secretary had to pay that dollar and a half. He thought the United States would admire both his
economy and his honesty in getting the work done at half price and not putting a pretended Indian's signature
to the voucher, but the United States did not see it in that light.

The United States was too much accustomed to employing dollar-and-a-half thieves in all manner of official
capacities to regard his explanation of the voucher as having any foundation in fact.

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 Roughing It, Part 3

But the next time the Indian sawed wood for us I taught him to make a cross at the bottom of the
voucher—it looked like a cross that had been drunk a year—and then I "witnessed" it and it went
through all right. The United States never said a word. I was sorry I had not made the voucher for a thousand
loads of wood instead of one.

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have
developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.

That was a fine collection of sovereigns, that first Nevada legislature. They levied taxes to the amount of
thirty or forty thousand dollars and ordered expenditures to the extent of about a million. Yet they had their
little periodical explosions of economy like all other bodies of the kind. A member proposed to save three
dollars a day to the nation by dispensing with the Chaplain. And yet that short-sighted man needed the
Chaplain more than any other member, perhaps, for he generally sat with his feet on his desk, eating raw
turnips, during the morning prayer.

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 Roughing It, Part 3

The legislature sat sixty days, and passed private tollroad franchises all the time. When they adjourned it was
estimated that every citizen owned about three franchises, and it was believed that unless Congress gave the
Territory another degree of longitude there would not be room enough to accommodate the toll-roads. The
ends of them were hanging over the boundary line everywhere like a fringe.

CHAPTER XXV. 39
 Roughing It, Part 3

The fact is, the freighting business had grown to such important proportions that there was nearly as much
excitement over suddenly acquired toll-road fortunes as over the wonderful silver mines.

CHAPTER XXVI.

By and by I was smitten with the silver fever. "Prospecting parties" were leaving for the mountains every day,
and discovering and taking possession of rich silver-bearing lodes and ledges of quartz. Plainly this was the
road to fortune. The great "Gould and Curry" mine was held at three or four hundred dollars a foot when we
arrived; but in two months it had sprung up to eight hundred. The "Ophir" had been worth only a mere trifle, a
year gone by, and now it was selling at nearly four thousand dollars a foot! Not a mine could be named that
had not experienced an astonishing advance in value within a short time. Everybody was talking about these
marvels. Go where you would, you heard nothing else, from morning till far into the night. Tom So-and-So
had sold out of the "Amanda Smith" for $40,000—hadn't a cent when he "took up" the ledge six
months ago. John Jones had sold half his interest in the "Bald Eagle and Mary Ann" for $65,000, gold coin,
and gone to the States for his family. The widow Brewster had "struck it rich" in the "Golden Fleece" and sold
ten feet for $18,000—hadn't money enough to buy a crape bonnet when Sing-Sing Tommy killed her
husband at Baldy Johnson's wake last spring. The "Last Chance" had found a "clay casing" and knew they
were "right on the ledge"—consequence, "feet" that went begging yesterday were worth a brick house
apiece to-day, and seedy owners who could not get trusted for a drink at any bar in the country yesterday were

CHAPTER XXVI. 40
 Roughing It, Part 3
roaring drunk on champagne to-day and had hosts of warm personal friends in a town where they had
forgotten how to bow or shake hands from long-continued want of practice. Johnny Morgan, a common
loafer, had gone to sleep in the gutter and waked up worth a hundred thousand dollars, in consequence of the
decision in the "Lady Franklin and Rough and Ready" lawsuit. And so on—day in and day out the talk
pelted our ears and the excitement waxed hotter and hotter around us.

I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest. Cart-loads of solid silver
bricks, as large as pigs of lead, were arriving from the mills every day, and such sights as that gave substance
to the wild talk about me. I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the craziest.

Every few days news would come of the discovery of a bran-new mining region; immediately the papers
would teem with accounts of its richness, and away the surplus population would scamper to take possession.
By the time I was fairly inoculated with the disease, "Esmeralda" had just had a run and "Humboldt" was
beginning to shriek for attention. "Humboldt! Humboldt!" was the new cry, and straightway Humboldt, the
newest of the new, the richest of the rich, the most marvellous of the marvellous discoveries in silver-land was
occupying two columns of the public prints to "Esmeralda's" one. I was just on the point of starting to
Esmeralda, but turned with the tide and got ready for Humboldt. That the reader may see what moved me, and
what would as surely have moved him had he been there, I insert here one of the newspaper letters of the day.
It and several other letters from the same calm hand were the main means of converting me. I shall not garble

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the extract, but put it in just as it appeared in the Daily Territorial Enterprise:

But what about our mines? I shall be candid with you. I shall express an
honest opinion, based upon a thorough examination. Humboldt county is the
richest mineral region upon God's footstool. Each mountain range is gorged
with the precious ores. Humboldt is the true Golconda.

The other day an assay of mere croppings yielded exceeding four thousand
dollars to the ton. A week or two ago an assay of just such surface
developments made returns of seven thousand dollars to the ton. Our
mountains are full of rambling prospectors. Each day and almost every hour
reveals new and more startling evidences of the profuse and intensified
wealth of our favored county. The metal is not silver alone. There are distinct
ledges of auriferous ore. A late discovery plainly evinces cinnabar. The
coarser metals are in gross abundance. Lately evidences of bituminous coal
have been detected. My theory has ever been that coal is a ligneous
formation. I told Col. Whitman, in times past, that the neighborhood of
Dayton (Nevada) betrayed no present or previous manifestations of a
ligneous foundation, and that hence I had no confidence in his lauded coal
mines. I repeated the same doctrine to the exultant coal discoverers of
Humboldt. I talked with my friend Captain Burch on the subject. My
pyrhanism vanished upon his statement that in the very region referred to he
had seen petrified trees of the length of two hundred feet. Then is the fact
established that huge forests once cast their grim shadows over this remote
section. I am firm in the coal faith. Have no fears of the mineral resources of
Humboldt county. They are immense—incalculable.

Let me state one or two things which will help the reader to better comprehend certain items in the above. At
this time, our near neighbor, Gold Hill, was the most successful silver mining locality in Nevada. It was from
there that more than half the daily shipments of silver bricks came. "Very rich" (and scarce) Gold Hill ore
yielded from $100 to $400 to the ton; but the usual yield was only $20 to $40 per ton—that is to say,
each hundred pounds of ore yielded from one dollar to two dollars. But the reader will perceive by the above
extract, that in Humboldt from one fourth to nearly half the mass was silver! That is to say, every one hundred
pounds of the ore had from two hundred dollars up to about three hundred and fifty in it. Some days later this
same correspondent wrote:

I have spoken of the vast and almost fabulous wealth of this region—it
is incredible. The intestines of our mountains are gorged with precious ore to
plethora. I have said that nature has so shaped our mountains as to furnish
most excellent facilities for the working of our mines. I have also told you
that the country about here is pregnant with the finest mill sites in the world.
But what is the mining history of Humboldt? The Sheba mine is in the hands
of energetic San Francisco capitalists. It would seem that the ore is combined
with metals that render it difficult of reduction with our imperfect mountain
machinery. The proprietors have combined the capital and labor hinted at in
my exordium. They are toiling and probing. Their tunnel has reached the
length of one hundred feet. From primal assays alone, coupled with the
development of the mine and public confidence in the continuance of effort,
the stock had reared itself to eight hundred dollars market value. I do not
know that one ton of the ore has been converted into current metal. I do know
that there are many lodes in this section that surpass the Sheba in primal

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assay value. Listen a moment to the calculations of the Sheba operators. They
purpose transporting the ore concentrated to Europe. The conveyance from
Star City (its locality) to Virginia City will cost seventy dollars per ton; from
Virginia to San Francisco, forty dollars per ton; from thence to Liverpool, its
destination, ten dollars per ton. Their idea is that its conglomerate metals will
reimburse them their cost of original extraction, the price of transportation,
and the expense of reduction, and that then a ton of the raw ore will net them
twelve hundred dollars. The estimate may be extravagant. Cut it in twain, and
the product is enormous, far transcending any previous developments of our
racy Territory.

A very common calculation is that many of our mines will yield five hundred
dollars to the ton. Such fecundity throws the Gould & Curry, the Ophir and
the Mexican, of your neighborhood, in the darkest shadow. I have given you
the estimate of the value of a single developed mine. Its richness is indexed
by its market valuation. The people of Humboldt county are feet crazy. As I
write, our towns are near deserted. They look as languid as a consumptive
girl. What has become of our sinewy and athletic fellow-citizens? They are
coursing through ravines and over mountain tops. Their tracks are visible in
every direction. Occasionally a horseman will dash among us. His steed
betrays hard usage. He alights before his adobe dwelling, hastily exchanges
courtesies with his townsmen, hurries to an assay office and from thence to
the District Recorder's. In the morning, having renewed his provisional
supplies, he is off again on his wild and unbeaten route. Why, the fellow
numbers already his feet by the thousands. He is the horse-leech. He has the
craving stomach of the shark or anaconda. He would conquer metallic
worlds.

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CHAPTER XXVI. 44
 Roughing It, Part 3

This was enough. The instant we had finished reading the above article, four of us decided to go to Humboldt.
We commenced getting ready at once. And we also commenced upbraiding ourselves for not deciding
sooner—for we were in terror lest all the rich mines would be found and secured before we got there,
and we might have to put up with ledges that would not yield more than two or three hundred dollars a ton,
maybe. An hour before, I would have felt opulent if I had owned ten feet in a Gold Hill mine whose ore
produced twenty-five dollars to the ton; now I was already annoyed at the prospect of having to put up with
mines the poorest of which would be a marvel in Gold Hill.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Hurry, was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of four persons—a blacksmith sixty
years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We put
eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson on a chilly
December afternoon. The horses were so weak and old that we soon found that it would be better if one or two
of us got out and walked. It was an improvement. Next, we found that it would be better if a third man got out.
That was an improvement also. It was at this time that I volunteered to drive, although I had never driven a
harnessed horse before and many a man in such a position would have felt fairly excused from such a
responsibility. But in a little while it was found that it would be a fine thing if the drive got out and walked
also. It was at this time that I resigned the position of driver, and never resumed it again. Within the hour, we
found that it would not only be better, but was absolutely necessary, that we four, taking turns, two at a time,
should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push it through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little
to do but keep out of the way and hold up the tongue. Perhaps it is well for one to know his fate at first, and
get reconciled to it. We had learned ours in one afternoon. It was plain that we had to walk through the sand
and shove that wagon and those horses two hundred miles. So we accepted the situation, and from that time
forth we never rode. More than that, we stood regular and nearly constant watches pushing up behind.

We made seven miles, and camped in the desert. Young Clagett (now member of Congress from Montana)
unharnessed and fed and watered the horses; Oliphant and I cut sagebrush, built the fire and brought water to
cook with; and old Mr. Ballou the blacksmith did the cooking. This division of labor, and this appointment,
was adhered to throughout the journey. We had no tent, and so we slept under our blankets in the open plain.
We were so tired that we slept soundly.

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We were fifteen days making the trip—two hundred miles; thirteen, rather, for we lay by a couple of
days, in one place, to let the horses rest.

We could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if we had towed the horses behind the wagon, but
we did not think of that until it was too late, and so went on shoving the horses and the wagon too when we
might have saved half the labor. Parties who met us, occasionally, advised us to put the horses in the wagon,
but Mr. Ballou, through whose iron-clad earnestness no sarcasm could pierce, said that that would not do,
because the provisions were exposed and would suffer, the horses being "bituminous from long deprivation."
The reader will excuse me from translating. What Mr. Ballou customarily meant, when he used a long word,
was a secret between himself and his Maker. He was one of the best and kindest hearted men that ever graced
a humble sphere of life. He was gentleness and simplicity itself—and unselfishness, too. Although he
was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself any airs, privileges, or exemptions on
that account. He did a young man's share of the work; and did his share of conversing and entertaining from
the general stand-point of any age—not from the arrogant, overawing summit-height of sixty years. His
one striking peculiarity was his Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and
independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was purposing to convey. He always let his
ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness. In truth his
air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as
meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world. If a word was long and grand and resonant,
that was sufficient to win the old man's love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place
in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning.

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We four always spread our common stock of blankets together on the frozen ground, and slept side by side;
and finding that our foolish, long-legged hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him, Oliphant got to
admitting him to the bed, between himself and Mr. Ballou, hugging the dog's warm back to his breast and
finding great comfort in it. But in the night the pup would get stretchy and brace his feet against the old man's
back and shove, grunting complacently the while; and now and then, being warm and snug, grateful and
happy, he would paw the old man's back simply in excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream
of the chase and in his sleep tug at the old man's back hair and bark in his ear. The old gentleman complained
mildly about these familiarities, at last, and when he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as
that was not a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was "so meretricious in his
movements and so organic in his emotions." We turned the dog out.

It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side; for after each day was done and our wolfish
hunger appeased with a hot supper of fried bacon, bread, molasses and black coffee, the pipe-smoking, song-
singing and yarn-spinning around the evening camp-fire in the still solitudes of the desert was a happy,
care-free sort of recreation that seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury.

It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or country-bred. We are descended from
desert-lounging Arabs, and countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us
the nomadic instinct. We all confess to a gratified thrill at the thought of "camping out."

Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made forty miles (through the Great American
Desert), and ten miles beyond—fifty in all—in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink
or rest. To stretch out and go to sleep, even on stony and frozen ground, after pushing a wagon and two horses
fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that for the moment it almost seems cheap at the price.

We camped two days in the neighborhood of the "Sink of the Humboldt." We tried to use the strong alkaline
water of the Sink, but it would not answer. It was like drinking lye, and not weak lye, either. It left a taste in
the mouth, bitter and every way execrable, and a burning in the stomach that was very uncomfortable. We put

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molasses in it, but that helped it very little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali was the prominent taste and so it
was unfit for drinking.

The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man has yet invented. It was really viler to the
taste than the unameliorated water itself. Mr. Ballou, being the architect and builder of the beverage felt
constrained to endorse and uphold it, and so drank half a cup, by little sips, making shift to praise it faintly the
while, but finally threw out the remainder, and said frankly it was "too technical for him."

But presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient, and then, with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and
no stragglers to interrupt it, we entered into our rest.

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CHAPTER XXVIII.

After leaving the Sink, we traveled along the Humboldt river a little way. People accustomed to the monster
mile-wide Mississippi, grow accustomed to associating the term "river" with a high degree of watery
grandeur. Consequently, such people feel rather disappointed when they stand on the shores of the Humboldt
or the Carson and find that a "river" in Nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of the Erie canal
in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and four times as deep. One of the pleasantest and most
invigorating exercises one can contrive is to run and jump across the Humboldt river till he is overheated, and
then drink it dry.

On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and entered Unionville, Humboldt county,
in the midst of a driving snow- storm. Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole. Six of the
cabins were strung along one side of a deep canyon, and the other five faced them. The rest of the landscape
was made up of bleak mountain walls that rose so high into the sky from both sides of the canyon that the
village was left, as it were, far down in the bottom of a crevice. It was always daylight on the mountain tops a
long time before the darkness lifted and revealed Unionville.

We built a small, rude cabin in the side of the crevice and roofed it with canvas, leaving a corner open to serve
as a chimney, through which the cattle used to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture and
interrupt our sleep. It was very cold weather and fuel was scarce. Indians brought brush and bushes several
miles on their backs; and when we could catch a laden Indian it was well—and when we could not
(which was the rule, not the exception), we shivered and bore it.

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I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground. I expected to see
it glittering in the sun on the mountain summits. I said nothing about this, for some instinct told me that I
might possibly have an exaggerated idea about it, and so if I betrayed my thought I might bring derision upon
myself. Yet I was as perfectly satisfied in my own mind as I could be of anything, that I was going to gather
up, in a day or two, or at furthest a week or two, silver enough to make me satisfactorily wealthy—and
so my fancy was already busy with plans for spending this money. The first opportunity that offered, I
sauntered carelessly away from the cabin, keeping an eye on the other boys, and stopping and contemplating
the sky when they seemed to be observing me; but as soon as the coast was manifestly clear, I fled away as
guiltily as a thief might have done and never halted till I was far beyond sight and call. Then I began my
search with a feverish excitement that was brimful of expectation—almost of certainty. I crawled about
the ground, seizing and examining bits of stone, blowing the dust from them or rubbing them on my clothes,
and then peering at them with anxious hope. Presently I found a bright fragment and my heart bounded! I hid
behind a boulder and polished it and scrutinized it with a nervous eagerness and a delight that was more
pronounced than absolute certainty itself could have afforded. The more I examined the fragment the more I
was convinced that I had found the door to fortune. I marked the spot and carried away my specimen. Up and
down the rugged mountain side I searched, with always increasing interest and always augmenting gratitude
that I had come to Humboldt and come in time. Of all the experiences of my life, this secret search among the
hidden treasures of silver-land was the nearest to unmarred ecstasy. It was a delirious revel.

By and by, in the bed of a shallow rivulet, I found a deposit of shining yellow scales, and my breath almost
forsook me! A gold mine, and in my simplicity I had been content with vulgar silver! I was so excited that I

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half believed my overwrought imagination was deceiving me. Then a fear came upon me that people might be
observing me and would guess my secret. Moved by this thought, I made a circuit of the place, and ascended a
knoll to reconnoiter. Solitude. No creature was near. Then I returned to my mine, fortifying myself against
possible disappointment, but my fears were groundless—the shining scales were still there. I set about
scooping them out, and for an hour I toiled down the windings of the stream and robbed its bed. But at last the
descending sun warned me to give up the quest, and I turned homeward laden with wealth. As I walked along
I could not help smiling at the thought of my being so excited over my fragment of silver when a nobler metal
was almost under my nose. In this little time the former had so fallen in my estimation that once or twice I
was on the point of throwing it away.

The boys were as hungry as usual, but I could eat nothing. Neither could I talk. I was full of dreams and far
away. Their conversation interrupted the flow of my fancy somewhat, and annoyed me a little, too. I despised
the sordid and commonplace things they talked about. But as they proceeded, it began to amuse me. It grew to
be rare fun to hear them planning their poor little economies and sighing over possible privations and
distresses when a gold mine, all our own, lay within sight of the cabin and I could point it out at any moment.
Smothered hilarity began to oppress me, presently. It was hard to resist the impulse to burst out with
exultation and reveal everything; but I did resist. I said within myself that I would filter the great news
through my lips calmly and be serene as a summer morning while I watched its effect in their faces. I said:

"Where have you all been?"

"Prospecting."

"What did you find?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? What do you think of the country?"

"Can't tell, yet," said Mr. Ballou, who was an old gold miner, and had likewise had considerable experience
among the silver mines.

"Well, haven't you formed any sort of opinion?"

"Yes, a sort of a one. It's fair enough here, may be, but overrated. Seven thousand dollar ledges are scarce,
though.

"That Sheba may be rich enough, but we don't own it; and besides, the rock is so full of base metals that all
the science in the world can't work it. We'll not starve, here, but we'll not get rich, I'm afraid."

"So you think the prospect is pretty poor?"

"No name for it!"

"Well, we'd better go back, hadn't we?"

"Oh, not yet—of course not. We'll try it a riffle, first."

"Suppose, now—this is merely a supposition, you know—suppose you could find a ledge that
would yield, say, a hundred and fifty dollars a ton—would that satisfy you?"

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 Roughing It, Part 3
"Try us once!" from the whole party.

"Or suppose—merely a supposition, of course—suppose you were to find a ledge that would
yield two thousand dollars a ton—would that satisfy you?"

"Here—what do you mean? What are you coming at? Is there some mystery behind all this?"

"Never mind. I am not saying anything. You know perfectly well there are no rich mines here—of
course you do. Because you have been around and examined for yourselves. Anybody would know that, that
had been around. But just for the sake of argument, suppose—in a kind of general way—suppose
some person were to tell you that two-thousand-dollar ledges were simply contemptible—contemptible,
understand—and that right yonder in sight of this very cabin there were piles of pure gold and pure
silver—oceans of it—enough to make you all rich in twenty-four hours! Come!"

"I should say he was as crazy as a loon!" said old Ballou, but wild with excitement, nevertheless.

"Gentlemen," said I, "I don't say anything—I haven't been around, you know, and of course don't know
anything—but all I ask of you is to cast your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!"
and I tossed my treasure before them.

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There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over it under the candle-light. Then old
Ballou said:

"Think of it? I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents
an acre!"

So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken
and forlorn.

Moralizing, I observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold."

Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that
glitters is gold. So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and
that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the
rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human
nature cannot rise above that.

CHAPTER XXIX.

True knowledge of the nature of silver mining came fast enough. We went out "prospecting" with Mr. Ballou.
We climbed the mountain sides, and clambered among sage-brush, rocks and snow till we were ready to drop
with exhaustion, but found no silver—nor yet any gold. Day after day we did this. Now and then we
came upon holes burrowed a few feet into the declivities and apparently abandoned; and now and then we
found one or two listless men still burrowing. But there was no appearance of silver. These holes were the
beginnings of tunnels, and the purpose was to drive them hundreds of feet into the mountain, and some day
tap the hidden ledge where the silver was. Some day! It seemed far enough away, and very hopeless and
dreary. Day after day we toiled, and climbed and searched, and we younger partners grew sicker and still
sicker of the promiseless toil. At last we halted under a beetling rampart of rock which projected from the
earth high upon the mountain. Mr. Ballou broke off some fragments with a hammer, and examined them long
and attentively with a small eye-glass; threw them away and broke off more; said this rock was quartz, and
quartz was the sort of rock that contained silver. Contained it! I had thought that at least it would be caked on
the outside of it like a kind of veneering. He still broke off pieces and critically examined them, now and then
wetting the piece with his tongue and applying the glass. At last he exclaimed:

"We've got it!"

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We were full of anxiety in a moment. The rock was clean and white, where it was broken, and across it ran a
ragged thread of blue. He said that that little thread had silver in it, mixed with base metal, such as lead and
antimony, and other rubbish, and that there was a speck or two of gold visible. After a great deal of effort we
managed to discern some little fine yellow specks, and judged that a couple of tons of them massed together
might make a gold dollar, possibly. We were not jubilant, but Mr. Ballou said there were worse ledges in the
world than that. He saved what he called the "richest" piece of the rock, in order to determine its value by the
process called the "fire-assay." Then we named the mine "Monarch of the Mountains" (modesty of
nomenclature is not a prominent feature in the mines), and Mr. Ballou wrote out and stuck up the following
"notice," preserving a copy to be entered upon the books in the mining recorder's office in the town.

"NOTICE."

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"We the undersigned claim three claims, of three hundred feet each (and one
for discovery), on this silver-bearing quartz lead or lode, extending north and
south from this notice, with all its dips, spurs, and angles, variations and
sinuosities, together with fifty feet of ground on either side for working the
same."

We put our names to it and tried to feel that our fortunes were made. But when we talked the matter all over
with Mr. Ballou, we felt depressed and dubious. He said that this surface quartz was not all there was of our
mine; but that the wall or ledge of rock called the "Monarch of the Mountains," extended down hundreds and
hundreds of feet into the earth—he illustrated by saying it was like a curb-stone, and maintained a
nearly uniform thickness-say twenty feet—away down into the bowels of the earth, and was perfectly
distinct from the casing rock on each side of it; and that it kept to itself, and maintained its distinctive
character always, no matter how deep it extended into the earth or how far it stretched itself through and
across the hills and valleys. He said it might be a mile deep and ten miles long, for all we knew; and that
wherever we bored into it above ground or below, we would find gold and silver in it, but no gold or silver in
the meaner rock it was cased between. And he said that down in the great depths of the ledge was its richness,
and the deeper it went the richer it grew. Therefore, instead of working here on the surface, we must either
bore down into the rock with a shaft till we came to where it was rich—say a hundred feet or
so—or else we must go down into the valley and bore a long tunnel into the mountain side and tap the
ledge far under the earth. To do either was plainly the labor of months; for we could blast and bore only a few
feet a day—some five or six. But this was not all. He said that after we got the ore out it must be hauled
in wagons to a distant silver-mill, ground up, and the silver extracted by a tedious and costly process. Our
fortune seemed a century away!

But we went to work. We decided to sink a shaft. So, for a week we climbed the mountain, laden with picks,
drills, gads, crowbars, shovels, cans of blasting powder and coils of fuse and strove with might and main. At
first the rock was broken and loose and we dug it up with picks and threw it out with shovels, and the hole
progressed very well. But the rock became more compact, presently, and gads and crowbars came into play.
But shortly nothing could make an impression but blasting powder.

That was the weariest work! One of us held the iron drill in its place and another would strike with an
eight-pound sledge—it was like driving nails on a large scale. In the course of an hour or two the drill
would reach a depth of two or three feet, making a hole a couple of inches in diameter. We would put in a
charge of powder, insert half a yard of fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and
run. When the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air, we would go back and find about a
bushel of that hard, rebellious quartz jolted out. Nothing more. One week of this satisfied me. I resigned.
Clagget and Oliphant followed. Our shaft was only twelve feet deep. We decided that a tunnel was the thing
we wanted.

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So we went down the mountain side and worked a week; at the end of which time we had blasted a tunnel
about deep enough to hide a hogshead in, and judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the
ledge. I resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day longer. We decided that a tunnel was not
what we wanted. We wanted a ledge that was already "developed." There were none in the camp.

We dropped the "Monarch" for the time being.

Meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was a constantly growing excitement about our
Humboldt mines. We fell victims to the epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more "feet." We
prospected and took up new claims, put "notices" on them and gave them grandiloquent names. We traded
some of our "feet" for "feet" in other people's claims. In a little while we owned largely in the "Gray Eagle,"
the "Columbiana," the "Branch Mint," the "Maria Jane," the "Universe," the "Root-Hog-or- Die," the "Samson
and Delilah," the "Treasure Trove," the "Golconda," the "Sultana," the "Boomerang," the "Great Republic,"
the "Grand Mogul," and fifty other "mines" that had never been molested by a shovel or scratched with a pick.

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We had not less than thirty thousand "feet" apiece in the "richest mines on earth" as the frenzied cant phrased
it—and were in debt to the butcher. We were stark mad with excitement—drunk with
happiness—smothered under mountains of prospective wealth—arrogantly compassionate
toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvellous canyon—but our credit was not good at the
grocer's.

It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine. It was a beggars' revel. There was nothing doing in the
district—no mining—no milling—no productive effort—no income—and
not enough money in the entire camp to buy a corner lot in an eastern village, hardly; and yet a stranger would
have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires. Prospecting parties swarmed out of town with the
first flush of dawn, and swarmed in again at nightfall laden with spoil—rocks. Nothing but rocks.
Every man's pockets were full of them; the floor of his cabin was littered with them; they were disposed in
labeled rows on his shelves.

CHAPTER XXIX. 57
 Roughing It, Part 3

CHAPTER XXX.

I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand "feet" in undeveloped silver mines,
every single foot of which they believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars—and
as often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in the world. Every man you met
had his new mine to boast of, and his "specimens" ready; and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly
back you into a corner and offer as a favor to you, not to him, to part with just a few feet in the "Golden Age,"
or the "Sarah Jane," or some other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a "square meal"
with, as the phrase went. And you were never to reveal that he had made you the offer at such a ruinous price,
for it was only out of friendship for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice. Then he would fish a piece
of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as if he feared he might be waylaid and
robbed if caught with such wealth in his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an
eyeglass to it, and exclaim:

"Look at that! Right there in that red dirt! See it? See the specks of gold? And the streak of silver? That's from
the Uncle Abe. There's a hundred thousand tons like that in sight! Right in sight, mind you! And when we get
down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the richest thing in the world! Look at the assay! I don't
want you to believe me—look at the assay!"

CHAPTER XXX. 58
 Roughing It, Part 3

Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the portion of rock assayed had given
evidence of containing silver and gold in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the
ton.

I little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of rock and get it assayed! Very often, that
piece, the size of a filbert, was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it—and yet the
assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton of rubbish it came from!

On such a system of assaying as that, the Humboldt world had gone crazy. On the authority of such assays its
newspaper correspondents were frothing about rock worth four and seven thousand dollars a ton!

And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a quoted correspondent, whereby the
ore is to be mined and shipped all the way to England, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents
received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and other things in the ore being sufficient to
pay all the expenses incurred? Everybody's head was full of such "calculations" as those—such raving
insanity, rather. Few people took work into their calculations—or outlay of money either; except the
work and expenditures of other people.

CHAPTER XXX. 59
 Roughing It, Part 3
We never touched our tunnel or our shaft again. Why? Because we judged that we had learned the real secret
of success in silver mining—which was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and
the labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining!

Before leaving Carson, the Secretary and I had purchased "feet" from various Esmeralda stragglers. We had
expected immediate returns of bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant "assessments"
instead—demands for money wherewith to develop the said mines. These assessments had grown so
oppressive that it seemed necessary to look into the matter personally. Therefore I projected a pilgrimage to
Carson and thence to Esmeralda. I bought a horse and started, in company with Mr. Ballou and a gentleman
named Ollendorff, a Prussian—not the party who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his
wretched foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which never have occurred and
are never likely to occur in any conversation among human beings. We rode through a snow-storm for two or
three days, and arrived at "Honey Lake Smith's," a sort of isolated inn on the Carson river. It was a two-story
log house situated on a small knoll in the midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly Carson
winds its melancholy way. Close to the house were the Overland stage stables, built of sun-dried bricks. There
was not another building within several leagues of the place. Towards sunset about twenty hay-wagons
arrived and camped around the house and all the teamsters came in to supper—a very, very rough set.
There were one or two Overland stage drivers there, also, and half a dozen vagabonds and stragglers;
consequently the house was well crowded.

We walked out, after supper, and visited a small Indian camp in the vicinity. The Indians were in a great hurry
about something, and were packing up and getting away as fast as they could. In their broken English they
said, "By'm-by, heap water!" and by the help of signs made us understand that in their opinion a flood was
coming. The weather was perfectly clear, and this was not the rainy season. There was about a foot of water in
the insignificant river—or maybe two feet; the stream was not wider than a back alley in a village, and
its banks were scarcely higher than a man's head.

So, where was the flood to come from? We canvassed the subject awhile and then concluded it was a ruse,
and that the Indians had some better reason for leaving in a hurry than fears of a flood in such an exceedingly
dry time.

CHAPTER XXX. 60
 Roughing It, Part 3

At seven in the evening we went to bed in the second story—with our clothes on, as usual, and all three
in the same bed, for every available space on the floors, chairs, etc., was in request, and even then there was
barely room for the housing of the inn's guests. An hour later we were awakened by a great turmoil, and
springing out of bed we picked our way nimbly among the ranks of snoring teamsters on the floor and got to
the front windows of the long room. A glance revealed a strange spectacle, under the moonlight. The crooked
Carson was full to the brim, and its waters were raging and foaming in the wildest way—sweeping
around the sharp bends at a furious speed, and bearing on their surface a chaos of logs, brush and all sorts of
rubbish. A depression, where its bed had once been, in other times, was already filling, and in one or two
places the water was beginning to wash over the main bank. Men were flying hither and thither, bringing
cattle and wagons close up to the house, for the spot of high ground on which it stood extended only some
thirty feet in front and about a hundred in the rear. Close to the old river bed just spoken of, stood a little log
stable, and in this our horses were lodged.

CHAPTER XXX. 61
 Roughing It, Part 3

CHAPTER XXX. 62
 Roughing It, Part 3

While we looked, the waters increased so fast in this place that in a few minutes a torrent was roaring by the
little stable and its margin encroaching steadily on the logs. We suddenly realized that this flood was not a
mere holiday spectacle, but meant damage—and not only to the small log stable but to the Overland
buildings close to the main river, for the waves had now come ashore and were creeping about the foundations
and invading the great hay-corral adjoining. We ran down and joined the crowd of excited men and frightened
animals. We waded knee-deep into the log stable, unfastened the horses and waded out almost waist-deep, so
fast the waters increased. Then the crowd rushed in a body to the hay- corral and began to tumble down the
huge stacks of baled hay and roll the bales up on the high ground by the house. Meantime it was discovered
that Owens, an overland driver, was missing, and a man ran to the large stable, and wading in, boot-top deep,
discovered him asleep in his bed, awoke him, and waded out again. But Owens was drowsy and resumed his
nap; but only for a minute or two, for presently he turned in his bed, his hand dropped over the side and came
in contact with the cold water! It was up level with the mattress! He waded out, breast-deep, almost, and the
next moment the sun-burned bricks melted down like sugar and the big building crumbled to a ruin and was
washed away in a twinkling.

At eleven o'clock only the roof of the little log stable was out of water, and our inn was on an island in
mid-ocean. As far as the eye could reach, in the moonlight, there was no desert visible, but only a level waste
of shining water. The Indians were true prophets, but how did they get their information? I am not able to
answer the question. We remained cooped up eight days and nights with that curious crew. Swearing, drinking
and card playing were the order of the day, and occasionally a fight was thrown in for variety. Dirt and
vermin—but let us forget those features; their profusion is simply inconceivable—it is better that
they remain so.

There were two men——however, this chapter is long enough.

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