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some of them out, Comstock, “Old Virginia," and several others found "surface diggings" near "Slippery Gulch." They named the place "Gold Hill," and, staking out claims, proceeded to work the decomposed outcroppings over Crown Point, Yellow Jacket, Belcher, Kentuck, and other great mines as yet undiscovered. From the time they started the rockers, using water from a spring close by, Gold Hill averaged twenty dollars a day to the man. June 1st, O'Riley and McLaughlin, whose claim in Six Mile Cañon paid only two or three dollars a day, suddenly cut into the rock on the surface of Ophir, at the north end of the Comstock, and began to take out gold at the rate of a thousand dollars a day. They had only been working a few hours when Comstock happened along, saw the value of the discovery, laid a general floating claim to a mythical stock ranch in the region, and fairly bluffed the good-natured discoverers into taking himself and Manny Penrod as equal partners. "Kentuck" Osborne afterward came in, and the five took up the original Ophir claim.

The miners in the region soon staked out claims around Gold Hill and Ophir. "Dutch Nick" started a saloon and restaurant in a tent. "Old Virginia" went on a spree one night and christened the north-end camp "Virginia City." Comstock bubbled with happiness, and flung his money broadcast. But a rancher from Truckee Meadows, visiting the camp, picked up some of the despised "blue stuff" from the waste heap of Ophir, and afterward gave it to Judge Walsh, of Grass Valley, California, with the remark that "over in Washoe the miners were throwing it away." An assayer reported it to be nearly pure silver. This happened about midnight, and before dawn Judge Walsh was miles on the road to Virginia City, while hundreds of other men were making ready to follow. The Truckee Meadows rancher paid no attention to the excitement he had caused, but went quietly back to his farm. When Judge Walsh reached the camp Comstock sold for $11,000, only $10 of which was paid down. McLaughlin soon sold for $3,500, Osborne for $7,000, Penrod for $3,000. Careless, ignorant, the first Comstockers were blown aside like leaves in a whirlwind. They spent their money and drifted off here and there, pursued by ill-fortune. McLaughlin was soon cooking for a gang of men at $40 a month; “Old Virginia," while on a spree in 1861, was thrown from a horse and killed; Comstock, who had parted with his interests exactly two months after the ledge was struck, branched out into financial and matrimonial ventures, spent every dollar, wandered over Idaho and Montana vainly looking for another fortune, and in 1870 committed suicide. Sandy Bowers, who was considered a millionaire, went to Europe with his wife "to see the queen," and "had money to throw at the birds." He built a costly stone man

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sion in Washoe Valley before birds of prey obtained all his money. His widow, the "Washoe Seeress," made a living for years by curiously futile predictions regarding the stock market, and still reads the future for those who care to listen. One after another all the placer-mining Comstockers went down before the rush of silver seekers.

That rush was in many respects the most remarkable one that California ever had known. Decidedly the best account was written by J. Ross Browne, who made his Peep at Washoe a classic of early Nevada. Stirred, he says, by the shout of "Silver! silver! Acres of it! Miles of it!" he left San Francisco in March, 1860, and made his way to Placerville. Beyond this point there were no stages. The town was full of men anxious to cross the mountains, and "practicing for Washoe" in the saloons. Every sign bore Washoe in large letters. Pack trains were starting daily for the mines. No animal could be had for love or money. "Lodging accommodations" consisted of enough floor space on which to lie in one's blanket.

The next morning Browne started on foot. The muddy trail was literally lined with broken-down vehicles and goods of every description. He stopped at nightfall in "Dirty Mike's" shanty, in which the bar and the public bedroom were the chief features. The second day hundreds of persons were in sight along the trailmen with wheelbarrows, handcarts, donkeys, mules; gamblers on fancy mustangs, whisky peddlers, organ grinders, drovers, Mexicans. Rain, snow, and slush prevailed for miles before he reached. the log cabins of Strawberry. There he slept on the floor with about forty other pilgrims, and had his stockings stolen, which "were above gold or silver in this foot-weary land." Three feet of snow in the morning, four hundred men in the camp, and provisions low; eight hard miles to the summit, nine more to Woodford's. Browne and several others tried the trail, but were forced to return to Strawberry. The next day he tried it alone. The trail was over old snow, honeycombed with holes hidden by the new snowfall; pack trains were floundering through and occasionally falling into the cañons. Wind and sleet all day; mud knee deep in Hope Valley; all in all a terrible day's experience. The fifth day Browne's course was along the Carson. He was so worn out that he could only cover about eighteen miles between sunrise and nine o'clock at night. The sixth day he arrived at Carson City, and took the stage for the mines.

Virginia City, as Ross Browne saw it in the spring of 1860, lay outspread on a slope of mountains, speckled with snow and sagebrush and mounds of upturned earth. The dwellings were rude board shanties; tents of blankets, sacks, old shirts, and canvas; huts of mud and rock, caves in the hillside, and hollow heaps

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of brush. Piles of goods were scattered about in the rain and snow. A scathing wind, the "Washoe zephyr," tore the huts apart and filled the air with gravel. Crowds were gathered in open places, trading claims or fighting over them. Other crowds were drinking and gambling in the numerous saloons. Rough, unkempt, unwashed miners, speculators, bummers, thieves, cutthroats filled the raw, unsightly mining camp with horrible confusion. "In truth," says our artless adventurer, "there was much to confirm the foreboding with which I had entered the Devil's Gate."

In a short time the demands of the Washoe country developed a complete system of transportation over three great toll roads, the finest on the Pacific coast. Massive freight wagons, marking in every detail the utmost skill of California workers in wood and iron, carried all the supplies for Nevada. Bearded and weather-beaten freighters, who were also owners of their outfits, walked beside the great mule teams. Each freighter carried his rod of empire, a short hickory handle to which was attached a long, close-plaited whiplash as big as one's wrist at the swelling part. At first receiving twenty-five cents a pound for whatever was carried between Sacramento and Virginia City, and hauling a thousand pounds to the animal, the freighter in a year or so was able to move twenty-four tons besides the wagons, with a sixteen-mule team, at a cost of four cents a pound for the entire distance. It is said that there is not on record in courts or newspapers a single instance of the loss of goods in transit either by fraud, force, or carelessness during all the years of the Nevada freighter's glory.

One stage line carried twelve thousand passengers to Nevada in 1863. Schedule time in 1861 had been three days for the one hundred and sixty-two miles, but it was soon reduced to eighteen hours. Three wealthy mining operators were once taken from Virginia City to the steamboat wharf in Sacramento in twelve hours and twenty-three minutes. Old travelers still recall with pleasure the ride across the mountains on the Placerville route. Its most striking moment was when one first saw from the summit of the pass the hyacinthine waters of sealike Tahoe and the level desert. "The eastward-gazing grizzly bear," to quote from one of the stories written by an old Elko silver miner, the late Dr. Gally, "lifts his flexible nostril to sniff the odor of the arid waste, then slowly turns and prowls westward. There is a visible line eastward where two worlds appear to meet. Beyond is the great empire of Artemisia,' where gold and silver were married in the volcanic chambers of the awful past. One sees the land of Washoe outstretched from the mountain tops, with its browns. and grays, its arid junipers and dull nut pines, its crags of lime

stone, basalt, porphyry, granite, in naked barrenness. There, underfoot," writes Dr. Gally, "the world is dry, gray, silent. Overhead, during the long cloudless day, it is pale blue, dry, silent. All abroad it is gray or dark with mountain distance, and it is silent. Silence is everywhere. No roar of far-off torrents tumbling down the hills to jar the night air underneath the stars -the stars still are, but all the torrents have departed. At some lost period backward of all dates, the Great High Sheriff of the universe in open court has cried Silence and has been obeyed."

Into such a land the silver seekers came, and it claimed them for its own. Soil, climate, topography, environment, began to create the Nevada type, with its large freedom, its quick comprehension, its broadly humorous buoyancy, and similar characteristics that one finds abundantly illustrated in such books as Mark Twain's Roughing It and in the writings of a great group of younger newspaper men. "Desperate climatic humor" is what Dr. Gally calls it. Occasionally an old copy of an early Nevada newspaper turns up, fairly scintillating with wit and sarcasm, but for the most part the files have been destroyed in the great fires. Said brave old De Quille, companion reporter with Mark Twain on the Territorial Enterprise:

"I used to make the newspaper my notebook for years, and I thought what a book I could write some day out of that notebook; but now I don't know of a single file in existence."

Still there are gleams of the past in stray copies that have escaped the fires. Senator Stewart was the most prominent man on the Comstock in the days before Sharon, and the Gold Hill News, amazed at his audacity, once likened him to the Colossus of Rhodes-he was as large and contained as much brass. Mark Twain, in his forgotten Proceedings of the Third House, once burlesqued nearly every member of the Constitutional Convention of 1863. Larrowe, of Landor, for instance, was made to glorify the "nine sceptered and anointed quartz mills" of his district until the president ordered him to "hold his clatter" and drop Reese River quartz-mill statistics. Mr. Stewart, after a long speech on miners' taxes, was told: "Take your seat, Bill Stewart. I have been reporting and reporting that same infernal speech of yours for thirty days. . . . You and your bed-rock tunnels and your blighted miners' blasted hopes have gotten to be a sort of nightmare to me and I won't put up with it any longer." The wealth of material in this field would fill volumes instead of paragraphs.

Hardly had the first rich ore been taken from the Comstock when an age of litigation commenced. The early claims overlapped and were badly defined, some being taken up under placer rules, others as quartz claims, and all without accurate surveys. Mat

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