My salary was increased to forty dollars a week. But I seldom drew it. I
had plenty of other resources, and what were two broad twenty-dollar gold
pieces to a man who had his pockets full of such and a cumbersome
abundance of bright half dollars besides? [Paper money has never come into
use on the Pacific coast.] Reporting was lucrative, and every man in the
town was lavish with his money and his “feet.” The city and
all the great mountain side were riddled with mining shafts. There were
more mines than miners. True, not ten of these mines were yielding rock
worth hauling to a mill, but everybody said, “Wait till the shaft
gets down where the ledge comes in solid, and then you will see!” So
nobody was discouraged. These were nearly all “wild cat”
mines, and wholly worthless, but nobody believed it then. The “Ophir,”
the “Gould & Curry,” the “Mexican,” and other
great mines on the Comstock lead in Virginia and Gold Hill were turning
out huge piles of rich rock every day, and every man believed that his
little wild cat claim was as good as any on the “main lead”
and would infallibly be worth a thousand dollars a foot when he “got
down where it came in solid.” Poor fellow, he was blessedly blind to
the fact that he never would see that day. So the thousand wild cat shafts
burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth day by day, and all men were
beside themselves with hope and happiness. How they labored, prophesied,
exulted! Surely nothing like it was ever seen before since the world
began. Every one of these wild cat mines—not mines, but holes in the
ground over imaginary mines—was incorporated and had handsomely
engraved “stock” and the stock was salable, too. It was bought
and sold with a feverish avidity in the boards every day. You could go up
on the mountain side, scratch around and find a ledge (there was no lack
of them), put up a “notice” with a grandiloquent name in it,
start a shaft, get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove
that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market
and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. To make money,
and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner.
Every man owned “feet” in fifty different wild cat mines and
considered his fortune made. Think of a city with not one solitary poor
man in it! One would suppose that when month after month went by and still
not a wild cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any
claim not located on the mother vein, i.e., the “Comstock”)
yielded a ton of rock worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if
they were not putting too much faith in their prospective riches; but
there was not a thought of such a thing. They burrowed away, bought and
sold, and were happy.
New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run
straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty
“feet,” and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a
notice of it. They did not care a fig what you said about the property so
you said something. Consequently we generally said a word or two to the
effect that the “indications” were good, or that the ledge was
“six feet wide,” or that the rock “resembled the
Comstock” (and so it did—but as a general thing the
resemblance was not startling enough to knock you down). If the rock was
moderately promising, we followed the custom of the country, used strong
adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very marvel in silver
discoveries had transpired. If the mine was a “developed” one,
and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn’t), we praised the
tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in the land;
driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out of
ecstasies—but never said a word about the rock. We would squander
half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed
pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of
admiration of the “gentlemanly and efficient Superintendent”
of the mine—but never utter a whisper about the rock. And those
people were always pleased, always satisfied. Occasionally we patched up
and varnished our reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating
accuracy, by giving some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have
made its dry bones rattle—and then somebody would seize it and sell
it on the fleeting notoriety thus conferred upon it.
There was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not
salable. We received presents of “feet” every day. If we
needed a hundred dollars or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away,
satisfied that it would ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot. I
had a trunk about half full of “stock.” When a claim made a
stir in the market and went up to a high figure, I searched through my
pile to see if I had any of its stock—and generally found it.
The prices rose and fell constantly; but still a fall disturbed us little,
because a thousand dollars a foot was our figure, and so we were content
to let it fluctuate as much as it pleased till it reached it. My pile of
stock was not all given to me by people who wished their claims “noticed.”
At least half of it was given me by persons who had no thought of such a
thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple verbal “thank you;”
and you were not even obliged by law to furnish that. If you are coming up
the street with a couple of baskets of apples in your hands, and you meet
a friend, you naturally invite him to take a few. That describes the
condition of things in Virginia in the “flush times.” Every
man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual custom of
the country to part with small quantities of it to friends without the
asking.
Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a
man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and
binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly
afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted. Mr. Stewart
(Senator, now, from Nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet
of “Justis” stock if I would walk over to his office. It was
worth five or ten dollars a foot. I asked him to make the offer good for
next day, as I was just going to dinner. He said he would not be in town;
so I risked it and took my dinner instead of the stock. Within the week
the price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty,
but nothing could make that man yield. I suppose he sold that stock of
mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket. [My revenge will be
found in the accompanying portrait.] I met three friends one afternoon,
who said they had been buying “Overman” stock at auction at
eight dollars a foot. One said if I would come up to his office he would
give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said he
would do the same. But I was going after an inquest and could not stop. A
few weeks afterward they sold all their “Overman” at six
hundred dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it—and
also to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people
tried to force on me.
These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still
confine myself strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave us as much
as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a
foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest a
cigar. These were “flush times” indeed! I thought they were
going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.
To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community, I
will remark that “claims” were actually “located”
in excavations for cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be
quartz veins—and not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very
heart of the city; and forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the
market. It was small matter who the cellar belonged to—the “ledge”
belonged to the finder, and unless the United States government interfered
(inasmuch as the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble
metals in Nevada—or at least did then), it was considered to be his
privilege to work it. Imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among
the costly shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste
the ground with pick and shovel and blasting powder! It has been often
done in California. In the middle of one of the principal business streets
of Virginia, a man “located” a mining claim and began a shaft
on it. He gave me a hundred feet of the stock and I sold it for a fine
suit of clothes because I was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft
and sue for damages. I owned in another claim that was located in the
middle of another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that
“East India” stock (as it was called) sold briskly although
there was an ancient tunnel running directly under the claim and any man
could go into it and see that it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything
that remotely resembled one.
One plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to “salt” a wild cat
claim and sell out while the excitement was up. The process was simple.
The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a wagon
load of rich “Comstock” ore, dumped a portion of it into the
shaft and piled the rest by its side, above ground. Then he showed the
property to a simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure. Of course the
wagon load of rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his
purchase. A most remarkable case of “salting” was that of the
“North Ophir.” It was claimed that this vein was a “remote
extension” of the original “Ophir,” a valuable mine on
the “Comstock.” For a few days everybody was talking about the
rich developments in the North Ophir. It was said that it yielded
perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps. I went to the place with the
owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet deep, in the bottom of which
was a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish, unpromising rock. One would
as soon expect to find silver in a grindstone. We got out a pan of the
rubbish and washed it in a puddle, and sure enough, among the sediment we
found half a dozen black, bullet-looking pellets of unimpeachable “native”
silver. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing before; science could not
account for such a queer novelty. The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a
foot, and at this figure the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan,
bought a commanding interest and prepared to quit the stage once more—he
was always doing that. And then it transpired that the mine had been
“salted”—and not in any hackneyed way, either, but in a
singularly bold, barefaced and peculiarly original and outrageous fashion.
On one of the lumps of “native” silver was discovered the
minted legend, “TED STATES OF,” and then it was plainly
apparent that the mine had been “salted” with melted
half-dollars! The lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they
resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in
the bottom of the shaft. It is literally true. Of course the price of the
stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined. But for this
calamity we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.
