University of Virginia Library

5. V.
WASHOE.

We reach Carson City about nine o'clock in the
morning. It is the capital of the Silver-producing
territory of Nevada.

They shoot folks here somewhat, and the law is
rather partial than otherwise to first-class murderers.

I visit the territorial Prison, and the Warden
points out the prominent convicts to me, thus:

“This man's crime was horse-stealing. He is
here for life.

“This man is in for murder. He is here for three
years.”

But shooting isn't as popular in Nevada as it
once was. A few years since they used to have a
dead man for breakfast every morning. A reformed
desperado told me that he supposed he had killed
men enough to stock a grave-yard. “A feeling of
remorse,” he said, “sometimes comes over me! Bu
I'm an altered man now. I hain't killed a man for

over two weeks! What'll yer poison yourself with?”
he added, dealing a resonant blow on the bar.

There used to live near Carson City a notorious
desperado, who never visited town without killing
somebody. He would call for liquor at some drinking-house,
and if anybody declined joining him he
would at once commence shooting. But one day he
shot a man too many. Going into the St. Nicholas
drinking-house he asked the company present to
join him in a North American drink. One individual
was rash enough to refuse. With a look of
sorrow rather than of anger the desperado revealed
his revolver, and said, “Good God! Must I kill a
man every time I come to Carson?” and so saying
he fired and killed the individual on the spot. But
this was the last murder the bloodthirsty miscreant
ever committed, for the aroused citizens pursued
him with rifles and shot him down in his own door-yard.

I lecture in the theatre at Carson, which opens
out of a drinking and gambling house. On each side
of the door where my ticket-taker stands there are

montè-boards and sweat-cloths, but they are deserted
to-night, the gamblers being evidently of a
literary turn of mind.

Five years ago there was only a pony-path over
the precipitous hills on which now stands the marvellous
city of Virginia, with its population of twelve
thousand persons, and perhaps more. Virginia, with
its stately warehouses and gay shops; its splendid
streets, paved with silver ore; its banking houses
and faro-banks; its attractive coffee-houses and elegant
theatre; its music halls and its three daily newspapers.

Virginia is very wild, but I believe it is now pretty
generally believed that a mining city must go through
with a certain amount of unadulterated cussedness
before it can settle down and behave itself in a conservative
and seemly manner. Virginia has grown
up in the heart of the richest silver regions in the
world, the El Dorado of the hour; and of the immense
numbers who swarming thither not more
than half carry their mother's Bible or any settled
religion with them. The gambler and the strange

woman as naturally seek the new sensational town
as ducks take to that element which is so useful for
making cocktails and bathing one's feet; and these
people make the new town rather warm for awhile.
But by-and-by the earnest and honest citizens get
tired of this ungodly nonsense and organize a Vigilance
Committee, which hangs the more vicious of
the pestiferous crowd to a sour apple-tree; and then
come good municipal laws, ministers, meeting-houses,
and a tolerably sober police in blue coats with brass
buttons. About five thousand able-bodied men are
in the mines underground, here; some as far down as
five hundred feet. The Gould & Curry Mine employs
nine hundred men, and annually turns out
about twenty million dollars' worth of “demnition
gold and silver,” as Mr. Mantalini might express it
—though silver chiefly.

There are many other mines here and at Gold-Hill
(another startling silver city, a mile from here), all
of which do nearly as well. The silver is melted
down into bricks of the size of common house bricks;
then it is loaded into huge wagons, each drawn by
eight and twelve mules, and sent off to San Francisco.

To a young person fresh from the land of greenbacks
this careless manner of carting off solid silver
is rather of a startler. It is related that a young
man who came Overland from New Hampshire a
few months before my arrival became so excited
about it that he fell in a fit, with the name of his
Uncle Amos on his lips! The hardy miners supposed
he wanted his uncle there to see the great sight, and
faint with him. But this was pure conjecture, after
all.

I visit several of the adjacent mining towns, but
I do not go to Aurora. No, I think not. A lecturer
on psychology was killed there the other night by
the playful discharge of a horse-pistol in the hands
of a degenerate and intoxicated Spaniard. This circumstance,
and a rumor that the citizens are agin
literature, induce me to go back to Virginia.

I had pointed out to me at a Restaurant a man
who had killed four men in street broils, and who
had that very day cut his own brother's breast open
in a dangerous manner with a small supper knife.

He was a gentleman, however. I heard him tell
some men so. He admitted it himself. And I don't
think he would lie about a little thing like that.

The theatre at Virginia will attract the attention
of the stranger, because it is an unusually elegant
affair of the kind, and would be so regarded anywhere.
It was built, of course, by Mr. Thomas Maguire,
the Napoleonic manager of the Pacific, and
who has built over twenty theatres in his time and
will perhaps build as many more, unless somebody
stops him—which, by the way, will not be a remarkably
easy thing to do.

As soon as a mining camp begins to assume the
proportions of a city; at about the time the whiskey-vender
draws his cork or the gambler spreads his
green cloth, Maguire opens a theatre, and with a
hastily-organized “Vigilance Committee” of actors,
commences to execute Shakspeare.