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 discouraged. 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.
