44. CHAPTER XLIV.
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 discourage. 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.