58. CHAPTER LVIII.
FOR a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new
phase of existence—a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to
be responsible to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. I fell
in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After
the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was
Paradise to me. I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in
the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to
seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant
ear than enchanted it, if I had had the vulgar honesty to confess it.
However, I suppose I was not greatly worse than the most of my
countrymen in that. I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at
last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress,
simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polked and
schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo. In a
word, I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand
dollars (prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when
that silver-mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East. I
spent money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock
sales with an interested eye and looked to see what might happen
in Nevada.
Something very important happened. The property holders of
Nevada voted against the State Constitution; but the folks who had
nothing to lose were in the majority, and carried the measure over
their heads. But after all it did not immediately look like a
disaster, though unquestionably it was one
I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then concluded not to sell.
Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad; bankers, merchants,
lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very washerwomen
and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver stocks,
and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers
enriched and rich men beggared. What a gambling carnival it was!
Gould and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a
foot! And then—all of a sudden, out went the bottom and
everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction! The wreck
was complete.
The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was
an early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not
worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. I,
the cheerful idiot that had been squandering money like water, and
thought myself beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now as
much as fifty dollars when I gathered together my various debts
and paid them. I removed from the hotel to a very private
boarding house. I took a reporter's berth and went to work. I was
not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building confidently on the
sale of the silver mine in the east. But I could not hear from Dan.
My letters miscarried or were not answered.
One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the
office. The next day I went down toward noon as usual, and
found a note on my desk which had been there twenty-four hours.
It was signed "Marshall"—the Virginia reporter—and contained a
request that I should call at the hotel and see him and a friend or
two that night, as they would sail for the east in the morning. A
postscript added that their errand was a big mining speculation! I
was hardly ever so sick in my life. I abused myself for leaving
Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I ought to have
attended to myself; I abused myself for remaining away from the
office on the one day of all the year that I should have been there.
And thus berating myself I trotted a mile to the steamer wharf and
arrived just in time to be too late. The ship was in the stream and
under way.
I comforted myself with the thought that may be the
speculation would amount to nothing—poor comfort at best—and
then went back to my slavery, resolved to put up with my
thirty-five dollars a week and forget all about it.
A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake. It was one
which was long called the "great" earthquake, and is doubtless so
distinguished till this day. It was just after noon, on a bright
October day. I was coming down Third street. The only objects in
motion anywhere in sight in that thickly built and populous
quarter, were a man in a buggy behind me, and a street car
wending slowly up the cross street. Otherwise, all was solitude
and a Sabbath stillness. As I turned the corner, around a frame
house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that
here was an item!—no doubt a fight in that house. Before I could
turn and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the
ground seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent
joggling up and down, and
there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing
together. I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow. I
knew what it was, now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing
else, took out my watch and noted the time of day; at that moment
a third and still severer shock came, and as I reeled about on the
pavement trying to keep my footing, I saw a sight! The entire front
of a tall four-story brick building in Third street sprung outward
like a door and fell sprawling across the street, raising a dust like a
great volume of smoke! And here came the buggy—overboard
went the man, and in less time than I can tell it the vehicle was
distributed in small fragments along three hundred yards of street.
One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of
chair-rounds and rags down the thoroughfare. The street car had
stopped, the horses were rearing and plunging, the passengers were
pouring out at both ends, and one fat man had crashed half way
through a glass window on one side of the car, got wedged fast and
was squirming and screaming like an impaled madman.
Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could reach, was
vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one could
execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of
people stretching in endless procession down every street my
position commanded. Never was solemn solitude turned into
teeming life quicker.
Of the wonders wrought by "the great earthquake," these were
all that came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far
and wide over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days.
The destruction of property was trifling—the injury to it was
wide-spread and somewhat serious.
The "curiosities" of the earthquake were simply endless.
Gentlemen and ladies who were sick, or were taking a siesta, or
had dissipated till a late hour and were making up lost sleep,
thronged into the public streets in all sorts of queer apparel, and
some without any at all. One woman who had been washing a
naked child, ran down the street holding it by the ankles as if it
were a dressed turkey. Prominent citizens who were supposed to
keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons
in their shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands. Dozens of
men with necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops,
lathered to the eyes or with one cheek clean shaved and the other
still bearing a hairy stubble. Horses broke from stables, and a
frightened dog rushed up a short attic ladder and out on to a roof,
and when his scare was over had not the nerve to go down again
the same way he had gone up.
A promment editor flew down stairs, in the principal hotel, with
nothing on but one brief undergarment—met a chambermaid, and
exclaimed:
"Oh, what shall I do!
Where shall I go!"
She responded with naive serenity:
"If you have no choice, you might try a clothing-store!"
A certain foreign consul's lady was the acknowledged leader of
fashion, and evry time she appeared in anything new or
extraordinary, the ladies in the vicinity made a raid on their
husbands' purses and arrayed themselves similarly. One man
who had suffered considerably and growled accordingly, was
standing at the window when the shocks came, and the next instant
the consul's wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no other
apology for clothing than—a bath-towel! The sufferer rose superior
to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife:
"Now that is
something like! Get
out your towel my dear!"
The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day,
would have covered several acres of ground. For some days
afterward, groups of eyeing and pointing men stood about many a
building, looking at long zig-zag cracks that extended from the
eaves to the ground. Four feet of the tops of three chimneys on
one house were broken square off and turned around in such a way
as to completely stop the draft.
A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the
middle of one street and then shut together again with such force,
as to ridge up the meeting earth like a slender grave. A lady sitting
in her rocking and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling,
open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then-drop the end of a brick
on the floor like a tooth. She was a woman easily digusted with
foolishness, and she arose and went out of there. One lady who
was coming down stairs was astonished to see a bronze Hercules
lean forward on its pedestal as if to strike her with its club. They
both reached the bottom of the flight at the same time,—the woman
insensible from the fright. Her child, born some little time
afterward, was club-footed. However—on second thought,—if the
reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at his own
risk.
The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in
one of the churches. The minister, with uplifted hands, was just
closing the services. He glanced up, hesitated, and said:
"However, we will omit the benediction!"—and the next instant
there was a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood.
After the first shock, an Oakland minister said:
"Keep your seats! There is no better place to die than
this"—
And added, after the third:
"But outside is good enough!" He then skipped out at the back
door.
Such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet
bottles as the earthquake created, San Francisco never saw before.
There was hardly a girl or a matron in the city but suffered losses
of this kind. Suspended pictures were thrown down, but oftener
still, by a curious freak of the earthquake's humor, they were
whirled completely around with their faces to the wall! There was
great difference of opinion, at first, as to the course or direction the
earthquake traveled, but water that splashed out of various tanks
and buckets settled that. Thousands of people were made so
sea-sick by the rolling and pitching of floors and streets that they
were weak and bed-ridden for hours, and some few for even days
afterward.—Hardly an individual escaped nausea entirely.
The queer earthquake—episodes that formed the staple of
San Francisco gossip for the next week would fill a much larger
book than this, and so I will diverge from the subject.
By and by, in the due course of things, I picked up a copy of
the Enterprise one day,
and fell under this cruel blow:
NEVADA MINES IN NEW YORK.—G. M. Marshall, Sheba
Hurs and Amos H. Rose, who left San Francisco last July for New
York City, with ores from mines in Pine Wood District, Humboldt
County, and on the Reese River range, have disposed of a mine
containing six thousand feet and called the Pine Mountains
Consolidated, for the sum of $3,000,000. The stamps on the deed,
which is now on its way to Humboldt County, from New York, for
record, amounted to $3,000, which is said to be the largest amount
of stamps ever placed on one document. A working capital of
$1,000,000 has been paid into the treasury, and machinery has
already been purchased for a large quartz mill, which will be put
up as soon as possible. The stock in this company is all full paid
and entirely unassessable. The ores of the mines in this district
somewhat resemble those of the Sheba mine in Humboldt. Sheba
Hurst, the discoverer of the mines, with his friends corralled all the
best leads and all the land and timber they desired before making
public their whereabouts. Ores from there, assayed in this city,
showed them to be exceedingly rich in silver and gold—silver
predominating. There is an abundance of wood and water in the
District. We are glad to know that New York capital has been
enlisted in the development of the mines of this region. Having
seen the ores and assays, we are satisfied that the mines of the
District are very valuable—anything but wild-cat.
Once more native imbecility had carried the day, and I had lost
a million! It was the "blind lead" over again.
Let us not dwell on this miserable matter. If I were inventing
these things, I could be wonderfully humorous over them; but they
are too true to be talked of with hearty levity, even at this distant
day.* Suffice
it that I so lost heart, and so yielded myself up to repinings
and sighings and foolish regrets, that I neglected my duties and
became about worthless, as a reporter for a brisk newspaper. And
at last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still
remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity
to resign my berth and so save myself the disgrace of a
dismissal.
[_]
True, and yet not exactly as given in the
above figures, possibly. I saw Marshall, months afterward, and
although he had plenty of money he did not claim to have captured
an entire million.
In fact I gathered that he had not then received $50,000. Beyond
that figure his fortune appeared to consist of uncertain vast
expectations rather than prodigious certainties. However, when
the above item appeared in print I put full faith in it, and
incontinently wilted and went to seed under it.