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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
