However, as I grew better acquainted with the business and
learned the run of the sources of information I ceased to require
the aid of fancy to any large extent, and became able to fill my
columns without diverging noticeably from the domain of fact.
I struck up friendships with the reporters of the other
journals, and we swapped “regulars” with each other and thus
economized work. “Regulars” are permanent sources of news, like
courts, bullion returns, “clean-ups” at the quartz mills, and
inquests. Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we had an inquest
about every day, and so this department was naturally set down
among the “regulars.” We had lively papers in those days. My
great competitor among the reporters was Boggs of the Union. He
was an excellent reporter. Once in three or four months he would
get a little intoxicated, but as a general thing he was a wary
and cautious drinker although always ready to tamper a little
with the enemy. He had the advantage of me in one thing; he could
get the monthly public school report and I could not, because the
principal hated the Enterprise. One snowy night when the report
was due, I started out sadly wondering how I was going to get it.
Presently, a few steps up the almost deserted street I stumbled
on Boggs and asked him where he was going.
“After the school report.”
“I’ll go along with you.”
“No, sir. I’ll excuse you.”
“Just as you say.”
A saloon-keeper’s boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot
punch, and Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully. He gazed
fondly after the boy and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs.
I said:
“I wish you could help me get that school business, but since
you can’t, I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get
them to let me have a proof of it after they have set it up,
though I don’t begin to suppose they will. Good night.”
“Hold on a minute. I don’t mind getting the report and sitting
around with the boys a little, while you copy it, if you’re
willing to drop down to the principal’s with me.”
“Now you talk like a rational being. Come along.”
We plowed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report
and returned to our office. It was a short document and soon
copied. Meantime Boggs helped himself to the punch. I gave the
manuscript back to him and we started out to get an inquest, for
we heard pistol shots near by. We got the particulars with little
loss of time, for it was only an inferior sort of bar-room
murder, and of little interest to the public, and then we
separated. Away at three o’clock in the morning, when we had gone
to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual—for some
of the printers were good singers and others good performers on
the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion—the proprietor of
the Union strode in and desired to know if anybody had heard
anything of Boggs or the school report. We stated the case, and
all turned out to help hunt for the delinquent. We found him
standing on a table in a saloon, with an old tin lantern in one
hand and the school report in the other, haranguing a gang of
intoxicated Cornish miners on the iniquity of squandering the
public moneys on education “when hundreds and hundreds of honest
hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey.” [Riotous
applause.] He had been assisting in a regal spree with those
parties for hours. We dragged him away and put him to bed.
Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs
held me accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or
desire to compass its absence from that paper and was as sorry as
any one that the misfortune had occurred.
But we were perfectly friendly. The day that the school report
was next due, the proprietor of the “Genessee” mine furnished us
a buggy and asked us to go down and write something about the
property—a very common request and one always gladly acceded to
when people furnished buggies, for we were as fond of pleasure
excursions as other people. In due time we arrived at the
“mine”—nothing but a hole in the ground ninety feet deep, and no
way of getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and being
lowered with a windlass. The workmen had just gone off somewhere
to dinner. I was not strong enough to lower Boggs’s bulk; so I
took an unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in
the end of the rope, implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the
windlass get the start of him, and then swung out over the shaft.
I reached the bottom muddy and bruised about the elbows, but
safe. I lit the candle, made an examination of the rock, selected
some specimens and shouted to Boggs to hoist away. No answer.
Presently a head appeared in the circle of daylight away aloft,
and a voice came down:
“Are you all set?”
“All set—hoist away.”
“Are you comfortable?”
“Perfectly.”
“Could you wait a little?”
“Oh certainly—no particular hurry.”
“Well—good by.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“After the school report!”
And he did. I staid down there an hour, and surprised the
workmen when they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead
of a bucket of rock. I walked home, too—five miles—up hill. We
had no school report next morning; but the Union had.
Six months after my entry into journalism the grand “flush
times” of Silverland began, and they continued with unabated
splendor for three years. All difficulty about filling up the
“local department” ceased, and the only trouble now was how to
make the lengthened columns hold the world of incidents and
happenings that came to our literary net every day. Virginia had
grown to be the “livest” town, for its age and population, that
America had ever produced. The sidewalks swarmed with people—to
such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter to
stem the human tide. The streets themselves were just as crowded
with quartz wagons, freight teams and other vehicles. The
procession was endless. So great was the pack, that buggies
frequently had to wait half an hour for an opportunity to cross
the principal street. Joy sat on every countenance, and there was
a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye, that told of the
money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the
high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plenty as
dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a
melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen. There were
military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels,
theatres, “hurdy-gurdy houses,” wide-open gambling palaces,
political pow-wows, civic processions, street fights, murders,
inquests, riots, a whiskey mill every fifteen steps, a Board of
Aldermen, a Mayor, a City Surveyor, a City Engineer, a Chief of
the Fire Department, with First, Second and Third Assistants, a
Chief of Police, City Marshal and a large police force, two
Boards of Mining Brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen
jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of
building a church. The “flush times” were in magnificent flower!
Large fire-proof brick buildings were going up in the principal
streets, and the wooden suburbs were spreading out in all
directions. Town lots soared up to prices that were amazing.
The great “Comstock lode” stretched its opulent length
straight through the town from north to south, and every mine on
it was in diligent process of development. One of these mines
alone employed six hundred and seventy-five men, and in the
matter of elections the adage was, “as the ‘Gould and Curry’
goes, so goes the city.” Laboring men’s wages were four and six
dollars a day, and they worked in three “shifts” or gangs, and
the blasting and picking and shoveling went on without ceasing,
night and day.
The “city” of Virginia roosted royally midway up the steep
side of Mount Davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the
level of the sea, and in the clear Nevada atmosphere was visible
from a distance of fifty miles! It claimed a population of
fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand, and all day long half of
this little army swarmed the streets like bees and the other half
swarmed among the drifts and tunnels of the “Comstock,” hundreds
of feet down in the earth directly under those same streets.
Often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom of a blast
down in the bowels of the earth under the office.
The mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a
slant to it like a roof. Each street was a terrace, and from each
to the next street below the descent was forty or fifty feet. The
fronts of the houses were level with the street they faced, but
their rear first floors were propped on lofty stilts; a man could
stand at a rear first floor window of a C street house and look
down the chimneys of the row of houses below him facing D street.
It was a laborious climb, in that thin atmosphere, to ascend from
D to A street, and you were panting and out of breath when you
got there; but you could turn around and go down again like a
house a-fire—so to speak. The atmosphere was so rarified, on
account of the great altitude, that one’s blood lay near the
surface always, and the scratch of a pin was a disaster worth
worrying about, for the chances were that a grievous erysipelas
would ensue. But to offset this, the thin atmosphere seemed to
carry healing to gunshot wounds, and therefore, to simply shoot
your adversary through both lungs was a thing not likely to
afford you any permanent satisfaction, for he would be nearly
certain to be around looking for you within the month, and not
with an opera glass, either.
From Virginia’s airy situation one could look over a vast,
far-reaching panorama of mountain ranges and deserts; and whether
the day was bright or overcast, whether the sun was rising or
setting, or flaming in the zenith, or whether night and the moon
held sway, the spectacle was always impressive and beautiful.
Over your head Mount Davidson lifted its gray dome, and before
and below you a rugged canyon clove the battlemented hills,
making a sombre gateway through which a soft-tinted desert was
glimpsed, with the silver thread of a river winding through it,
bordered with trees which many miles of distance diminished to a
delicate fringe; and still further away the snowy mountains rose
up and stretched their long barrier to the filmy horizon—far
enough beyond a lake that burned in the desert like a fallen sun,
though that, itself, lay fifty miles removed. Look from your
window where you would, there was fascination in the picture. At
rare intervals—but very rare—there were clouds in our skies,
and then the setting sun would gild and flush and glorify this
mighty expanse of scenery with a bewildering pomp of color that
held the eye like a spell and moved the spirit like music.
