However, as I grew better acquainted with the business and learned the run
of the sources of information I ceased to require the aid of fancy to any
large extent, and became able to fill my columns without diverging
noticeably from the domain of fact.
I struck up friendships with the reporters of the other journals, and we
swapped “regulars” with each other and thus economized work.
“Regulars” are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion
returns, “clean-ups” at the quartz mills, and inquests.
Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we had an inquest about every day, and
so this department was naturally set down among the “regulars.”
We had lively papers in those days. My great competitor among the
reporters was Boggs of the Union. He was an excellent reporter.
Once in three or four months he would get a little intoxicated, but as a
general thing he was a wary and cautious drinker although always ready to
tamper a little with the enemy. He had the advantage of me in one thing;
he could get the monthly public school report and I could not, because the
principal hated the Enterprise. One snowy night when the report was
due, I started out sadly wondering how I was going to get it. Presently, a
few steps up the almost deserted street I stumbled on Boggs and asked him
where he was going.
“After the school report.”
“I’ll go along with you.”
“No, sir. I’ll excuse you.”
“Just as you say.”
A saloon-keeper’s boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot
punch, and Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully. He gazed fondly after
the boy and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs. I said:
“I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you
can’t, I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get
them to let me have a proof of it after they have set it up, though I don’t
begin to suppose they will. Good night.”
“Hold on a minute. I don’t mind getting the report and sitting
around with the boys a little, while you copy it, if you’re willing
to drop down to the principal’s with me.”
“Now you talk like a rational being. Come along.”
We plowed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report and returned
to our office. It was a short document and soon copied. Meantime Boggs
helped himself to the punch. I gave the manuscript back to him and we
started out to get an inquest, for we heard pistol shots near by. We got
the particulars with little loss of time, for it was only an inferior sort
of bar-room murder, and of little interest to the public, and then we
separated. Away at three o’clock in the morning, when we had gone to
press and were having a relaxing concert as usual—for some of the
printers were good singers and others good performers on the guitar and on
that atrocity the accordion—the proprietor of the Union
strode in and desired to know if anybody had heard anything of Boggs or
the school report. We stated the case, and all turned out to help hunt for
the delinquent. We found him standing on a table in a saloon, with an old
tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the other, haranguing a
gang of intoxicated Cornish miners on the iniquity of squandering the
public moneys on education “when hundreds and hundreds of honest
hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey.” [Riotous
applause.] He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for
hours. We dragged him away and put him to bed.
Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held
me accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to
compass its absence from that paper and was as sorry as any one that the
misfortune had occurred.
But we were perfectly friendly. The day that the school report was next
due, the proprietor of the “Genessee” mine furnished us a
buggy and asked us to go down and write something about the property—a
very common request and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished
buggies, for we were as fond of pleasure excursions as other people. In
due time we arrived at the “mine”—nothing but a hole in
the ground ninety feet deep, and no way of getting down into it but by
holding on to a rope and being lowered with a windlass. The workmen had
just gone off somewhere to dinner. I was not strong enough to lower Boggs’s
bulk; so I took an unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot
in the end of the rope, implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the
windlass get the start of him, and then swung out over the shaft. I
reached the bottom muddy and bruised about the elbows, but safe. I lit the
candle, made an examination of the rock, selected some specimens and
shouted to Boggs to hoist away. No answer. Presently a head appeared in
the circle of daylight away aloft, and a voice came down:
“Are you all set?”
“All set—hoist away.”
“Are you comfortable?”
“Perfectly.”
“Could you wait a little?”
“Oh certainly—no particular hurry.”
“Well—good by.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“After the school report!”
And he did. I staid down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when
they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock. I
walked home, too—five miles—up hill. We had no school report
next morning; but the Union had.
Six months after my entry into journalism the grand “flush times”
of Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three
years. All difficulty about filling up the “local department”
ceased, and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns
hold the world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net
every day. Virginia had grown to be the “livest” town, for its
age and population, that America had ever produced. The sidewalks swarmed
with people—to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy
matter to stem the human tide. The streets themselves were just as crowded
with quartz wagons, freight teams and other vehicles. The procession was
endless. So great was the pack, that buggies frequently had to wait half
an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street. Joy sat on every
countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye,
that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain
and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plenty as
dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a melancholy
countenance was nowhere to be seen. There were military companies, fire
companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, “hurdy-gurdy
houses,” wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic
processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill every
fifteen steps, a Board of Aldermen, a Mayor, a City Surveyor, a City
Engineer, a Chief of the Fire Department, with First, Second and Third
Assistants, a Chief of Police, City Marshal and a large police force, two
Boards of Mining Brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen jails and
station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. The
“flush times” were in magnificent flower! Large fire-proof
brick buildings were going up in the principal streets, and the wooden
suburbs were spreading out in all directions. Town lots soared up to
prices that were amazing.
The great “Comstock lode” stretched its opulent length
straight through the town from north to south, and every mine on it was in
diligent process of development. One of these mines alone employed six
hundred and seventy-five men, and in the matter of elections the adage
was, “as the ‘Gould and Curry’ goes, so goes the city.”
Laboring men’s wages were four and six dollars a day, and they
worked in three “shifts” or gangs, and the blasting and
picking and shoveling went on without ceasing, night and day.
The “city” of Virginia roosted royally midway up the steep
side of Mount Davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of
the sea, and in the clear Nevada atmosphere was visible from a distance of
fifty miles! It claimed a population of fifteen thousand to eighteen
thousand, and all day long half of this little army swarmed the streets
like bees and the other half swarmed among the drifts and tunnels of the
“Comstock,” hundreds of feet down in the earth directly under
those same streets. Often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom
of a blast down in the bowels of the earth under the office.
The mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it like
a roof. Each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street below
the descent was forty or fifty feet. The fronts of the houses were level
with the street they faced, but their rear first floors were propped on
lofty stilts; a man could stand at a rear first floor window of a C street
house and look down the chimneys of the row of houses below him facing D
street. It was a laborious climb, in that thin atmosphere, to ascend from
D to A street, and you were panting and out of breath when you got there;
but you could turn around and go down again like a house a-fire—so
to speak. The atmosphere was so rarified, on account of the great
altitude, that one’s blood lay near the surface always, and the
scratch of a pin was a disaster worth worrying about, for the chances were
that a grievous erysipelas would ensue. But to offset this, the thin
atmosphere seemed to carry healing to gunshot wounds, and therefore, to
simply shoot your adversary through both lungs was a thing not likely to
afford you any permanent satisfaction, for he would be nearly certain to
be around looking for you within the month, and not with an opera glass,
either.
From Virginia’s airy situation one could look over a vast,
far-reaching panorama of mountain ranges and deserts; and whether the day
was bright or overcast, whether the sun was rising or setting, or flaming
in the zenith, or whether night and the moon held sway, the spectacle was
always impressive and beautiful. Over your head Mount Davidson lifted its
gray dome, and before and below you a rugged canyon clove the battlemented
hills, making a sombre gateway through which a soft-tinted desert was
glimpsed, with the silver thread of a river winding through it, bordered
with trees which many miles of distance diminished to a delicate fringe;
and still further away the snowy mountains rose up and stretched their
long barrier to the filmy horizon—far enough beyond a lake that
burned in the desert like a fallen sun, though that, itself, lay fifty
miles removed. Look from your window where you would, there was
fascination in the picture. At rare intervals—but very rare—there
were clouds in our skies, and then the setting sun would gild and flush
and glorify this mighty expanse of scenery with a bewildering pomp of
color that held the eye like a spell and moved the spirit like music.
