 20 On the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peaks we had yet seen, and, although the day was very warm, the night that followed upon its heel was wintry cold, and blankets were next to useless. On the eighteenth day we encountered the eastward bound telegraph constructors at Reese River Station, and sent a message to His Excellency Governor Nye at Carson City, distant 156 miles. On the nineteenth day we crossed the great American desert, forty memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach-wheels sunk from six inches to a foot. We worked our passage most of the way across, that is to say, we got out and walked. It was a dreary pull and a long and thirsty one, for we had no water. From one extremity of this desert to the other the road was white with the bones of oxen and horses. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the forty miles and set our feet on the bone at every step. The desert was one prodigious graveyard, and the log chains, wagon tires, and rotting wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones. I think we saw log chains enough rusting there in the desert to reach across any state in the Union. Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to a California endured? At the border of the desert lies Carson Lake, or the sink of the Carson, a shallow, melancholy sheet of water, some eighty or a hundred miles in circumference. Carson River empties into it and is lost, sinks mysteriously into the earth, and never appears in the light of the sun again, for the lake has no outlet whatever. There are several rivers in Nevada, and they all have this mysterious fate. They end in various lakes or sinks, and that is the last of them. Carson Lake, Humboldt Lake, Walker Lake, Mono Lake all are great sheets of water without any visible outlet. Water is always flowing into them, none is ever seen to flow out of them, and yet they remain always level-full, neither receding nor overflowing. What they do with their surplus is only known to the Creator. On the western verge of the desert we halted a moment at Ragtown. It consisted of one log house and is not set down on the map. It reminds me of a circumstance, just after we left Julesburg on the Platte, I was sitting with the driver, and he said, I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville, and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier. Said he weren't in as much of a hurry as he was a while ago. But Hank Monk said, keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time. And you bet you he did, too, what was left of him. A day or two after that we picked up a Denver man at the crossroads, and he told us a good deal about the country and the Gregory Diggins. He seemed a very entertaining person and a man well posted in the affairs of Colorado. By and by, he remarked, I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage. And then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier. Said he weren't in as much of a hurry as he was a while ago. But Hank Monk said, keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time. And you bet you he did, too, what was left of him. At Fort Bridger, some days after this, we took on board a cavalry sergeant, a very proper and soldierly person indeed. From no other man during the whole journey did we gather such a store of concise and well-arranged military information. It was surprising to find in the desolate wilds of our country a man so thoroughly acquainted with everything useful to know in his line of life and yet of such inferior rank and unpretentious bearing. For as much as three hours we listened to him with unabated interest. Finally he got upon the subject of transcontinental travel and presently said, I can tell you a very laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through quickly. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage. And then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier. Said he weren't in as much of a hurry as he was a while ago. But Hank Monk said, keep your seat Horace, and I'll get you there on time. And you bet you he did too, what was left of him. When we were eight hours out from Salt Lake City a Mormon preacher got in with us at a way station, a gentle, soft-spoken, kindly man, and one whom any stranger would warm to at first sight. I can never forget the pathos that was in his voice as he told in simple language the story of his people's wanderings and unpitted sufferings. No pulpit eloquence was ever so moving and so beautiful as this outcast picture of the first Mormon pilgrimage across the plains, struggling sorrowfully onward to the land of its banishment and marking its desolate way with graves and watering it with tears. His words so wrought upon us that it was a relief to us all when the conversation drifted into a more cheerful channel and the natural features of the curious country we were in came under treatment. One matter after another was pleasantly discussed, and at length the stranger said, I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture in Placerville and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier. Said he weren't in as much of a hurry as he was a while ago. But Hank Monk said, keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time. And you bet you you bet you he did, too, what was left of him. Ten miles out of Ragtown we found a poor wanderer who had lain down to die. He had walked as long as he could, but his limbs had failed him at last. Hunger and fatigue had conquered him. It would have been inhuman to leave him there. We paid his fare to Carson and lifted him into the coach. It was some little time before he showed any very decided signs of life, but by dint of chafing him and pouring brandy between his lips we finally brought him to a languid consciousness. Then we fed him a little, and by and by he seemed to comprehend the situation and a grateful light softened his eye. We made his male sack bed as comfortable as possible and constructed a pillow for him with our coats. He seemed very thankful. Then he looked up in our faces and said in a feeble voice that had a tremble of honest emotion in it, Gentlemen, I know not who you are, but you have saved my life, and although I can never be able to repay you for it, I feel that I can at least make one hour of your long journey lighter. I take it you are strangers to this great thoroughfare, but I am entirely familiar with it. In this connection I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley, I said impressively, suffering stranger, proceed at your peril. You see in me the melancholy wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood. What has brought me to this? That thing which you are about to tell. Gradually, but surely, that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my constitution, withered my life, pity my helplessness, spare me only just this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little hatchet for a change. We were saved, but not so the invalid. In trying to retain the anecdote in his system he strained himself and died in our arms. I am aware now that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen of all that region what I asked of that mere shadow of a man, for after seven years residence on the Pacific Coast I know that no passenger or driver on the overland ever corked that anecdote in when a stranger was by and survived. Within a period of six years I crossed and recross the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times by stage and listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one or eighty-two times. I have the list somewhere. Drivers always told it. Conductors told it. Landlords told it. Chance Passengers told it. The very Chinamen and vagrant Indians recounted it. I have had the same driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon. It has come to me in all multitude of tongues that babble bequeath to earth and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozadont, tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers. Everything that has a fragrance to it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the sons of men. I never have smelt any anecdote as often as I have smelt that one. Never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that one. And you never could learn to know it by its smell because every time you thought you had learned the smell of it it would turn up with a different smell. Bayard Taylor has written about this whorey anecdote. Richardson has published it. So have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Brown, and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon the great Overland Road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco. And I have heard that it is in the Talmud. I have seen it in print in nine different foreign languages, and I have been told that it is employed in the Inquisition in Rome. And I now learn with regret that it is going to be set to music. I do not think that such things are right. Stage coaching on the Overland is no more, and stage drivers are a race defunct. I wonder if they bequeath that bald-headed anecdote to their successors, the railroad breakmen and conductors, and if these ladders still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific Coast are not Yosemite and the big trees, but Hank Monk and his adventure with Horace Greeley. And what makes that worn anecdote more aggravating is that the adventure it celebrates never occurred. If it were a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its chiefest virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness. But what ought to be done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a one as this? If I were to suggest what ought to be done to him, I should be called extravagant. But what does the sixteenth chapter of Daniel say? Ah-ha! End of Chapter 20 This is Chapter 21 of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It by Mark Twain. Chapter 21 We were approaching the end of our long journey. It was the morning of the twentieth day. At noon we would reach Carson City, the capital of Nevada Territory. We were not glad, but sorry. It has been a fine pleasure trip. We had fed fat on wonders every day. We were now well accustomed to stage life and very fond of it. So the idea of coming to a standstill and settling down to a hum-drum existence in a village was not agreeable, but on the contrary, depressing. Visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren snow-clad mountains. There was not a tree in sight. There was no vegetation but the endless sagebrush and greasewood. All nature was gray with it. We were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from a burning house. We were coated with it like millers. So were the coach, the mules, the mailbags, the driver. We and the sagebrush and the other scenery were all one monotonous color. Long trains of freight wagons in the distance enveloped in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of prairies on fire. These teams and their masters were the only life we saw. Otherwise we moved in the midst of solitude, silence, and desolation. Every twenty steps we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of birthing with its dust-coated skin stretched tightly over its empty ribs. Frequently a solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and contemplated the passing coach with its meditative serenity. By and by Carson City was pointed out to us. It nestled in the edge of a great plain and was a sufficient number of miles away to look like an assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a grim range of mountains overlooking it whose summits seemed lifted clear out of companionship and consciousness of earthly things. We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on. It was a wooden town, its population two thousand souls. The main street consisted of four or five blocks of little white-frame stores which were too high to sit down on, but not too high for various other purposes. In fact, hardly high enough. They were packed close together, side by side, as if Rome were scarce in that mighty plain. The sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and inclined to rattle when walked upon. In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was the plaza which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains, a large, unfenced level vacancy with a liberty pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse-trades, and mass meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the plaza were faced by stores, offices, and stables. The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering. We were introduced to several citizens, at the stage office and on the way up to the governors from the hotel, among others, to a Mr. Harris, who was on horseback. He began to say something but interrupted himself with a remark, I'll have to get you to excuse me a minute. Yonder is the witness that swore I helped to rob the California coach. A piece of impertinent inter-meddling, sir, for I am not even acquainted with a man. Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter, and the stranger began to explain with another. When the pistols were emptied, the stranger resumed his work, mending a whiplash, and Mr. Harris rode by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through one of his lungs, and several in his hips, and from them issued little rivulets of blood that coursed down the horse's sides and made the animal look quite picturesque. I never saw Harris shoot a man after that, but it recalled to mind that first day in Carson. This was all we saw that day, for it was two o'clock now, and according to Custom, the Daily Washu Zephyr set in. A soaring dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it, and the capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view. Still there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting to newcomers, for the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air, things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, coming and going, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust, hats, chickens, and parasols sailing in the remote heavens, blankets, tin signs, sagebrush, and shingles a shade lower, doormats and buffalo robes lower still, shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade, glass doors, cats and little children on the next, disrupted lumberyards, light buggies and wheel-barrows on the next, and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots. It was something to see that much. I could have seen more if I could have kept the dust out of my eyes. But seriously, a Washu wind is by no means a trifling matter. It blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stagecoach over and spills the passengers. And tradition says the reason there are so many bald people there is that the wind blows the hair off their heads, while they are looking skyward after their hats. Carson Street seldom look inactive on summer afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around their escaping hats like chamber-maids trying to head off a spider. The Washu Zephyr, Washu is a pet nickname for Nevada, is a peculiar scriptural wind in that no man knoweth whence it cometh, that is to say where it originates. It comes right over the mountains from the west, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find any of it on the other side. It probably is manufactured on the mountaintop for the occasion and starts from there. It is a pretty regular wind in the summertime. Its office hours are from two in the afternoon till two the next morning, and anybody venturing abroad during those twelve hours needs to allow for the wind, or he will bring up a mile or two to Lourdes of the point he is aiming at. And yet the first complaint a Washu visitor to San Francisco makes is that the sea winds blow so there. There is a good deal of human nature in that. We found the State Palace of the Governor of Nevada Territory to consist of a white frame one storey house with two small rooms in it and a stanchion supported shed in front for grandeur. It compelled the respect of the citizen and inspired the Indians with awe. The newly arrived chief and associate justices of the Territory and other machinery of the government were domiciled with less splendor. They were boarding around privately and had their offices in their bedrooms. The Secretary and I took quarters in the ranch of a worthy French lady by the name of Bridget O'Flanagan, a camp follower of his Excellency the Governor. She had known him in his prosperity as Commander-in-Chief of the Metropolitan Police of New York, and she would not desert him in his adversity as Governor of Nevada. Our room was on the lower floor facing the plaza, and when we had got our bed, a small table, two chairs, the government fire-proof safe, and the unabridged dictionary into it, there was still room enough left for a visitor, maybe two, but not without straining the walls. But the walls could stand it, at least the partitions could, for they consisted simply of one thickness of white cotton domestic stretched from corner to corner of the room. This was the rule in Carson. Any other kind of partition was the rare exception, and if you stood in a dark corner and your neighbors in the next had lights, the shadows on your canvas told queer secrets sometimes. Very often these partitions were made of old flower sacks, basted together, and then the difference between the common herd and the aristocracy was that the common herd had unornamented sacks, while the walls of the aristocrat were overpowering with rudimental fresco, i.e. red and blue mill brands on the flower sacks. Occasionally also the better classes embellished their canvas by pasting pictures from Harper's weekly on them. In many cases too the wealthy and the cultured rose to spittoons and other evidences of a sumptuous and luxurious taste. Washoo people take a joke so hard that I must explain that the above description was only the rule. There were many honorable exceptions in Carson. Plastered ceilings and houses that had considerable furniture in them. M.T. We had a carpet and a genuine Queenswear wash bowl. Consequently we were hated without reserve by the other tenants of the O'Flanagan Ranch. When we added a painted oilcloth window curtain we simply took our lives into our own hands. To prevent bloodshed I removed upstairs and took quarters with the untitled plebeians in one of the fourteen white pine cot bedsteads that stood in two long ranks in the one sole room of which the second story consisted. It was a jolly company, the Fourteen. They were principally voluntary camp followers of the Governor who had joined his retinue by their own election at New York and San Francisco and came along feeling that in the scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could not make their condition more precarious than it was and might reasonably expect to make it better. They were popularly known as the Irish Brigade, though there were only four or five Irishmen among all the Governor's retainers. His good-natured excellency was much annoyed at the gossip his henchmen created, especially when there arose a rumor that they were paid assassins of his, brought along to quietly reduce the Democratic vote when desirable. Mrs. O'Flanagan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars a week apiece, and they were cheerfully giving their notes for it. They were perfectly satisfied, but Bridget presently found that notes that could not be discounted were but a feeble constitution for a Carson boarding house, so she began to harry the Governor to find employment for the Brigade. Her importunities and theirs together drove him to a gentle desperation at last, and he finally summoned the Brigade to the presence. Then he said, Gentlemen, I have planned a lucrative and useful service for you. A service which will provide you with recreation amid noble landscapes, and affords you never ceasing opportunities for enriching your minds by observation and study. I want you to survey a railroad from Carson City westward to a certain point. When the legislature meets, I will have the necessary bill passed, and the remuneration arranged. What, a railroad over the Sierra Nevada mountains? Well, then, survey at eastward to a certain point. He converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers, and so on, and turned them loose in the desert. It was recreation with a vengeance. Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sagebrush under a sultry sun and among cattle-bones, coyotes, and tarantulas. Romantic adventure could go no further. They surveyed very slowly, very deliberately, very carefully. They returned every night during the first week, dusty, foot sore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly. They brought in great store of prodigious hairy spiders, tarantulas, and imprisoned them in covered tumblers upstairs in the ranch. After the first week they had to camp on the field, for they were getting well eastward. They made a good many inquiries as to the location of that indefinite certain point, but got no information. At last, to a peculiarly urgent inquiry of how far eastward, Governor Nye telegraphed back, to the Atlantic Ocean, blast you, and then bridge it and go on. This brought back the dusty toilers who sent in a report and ceased from their labors. The Governor was always comfortable about it. He said Mrs. O'Flanagan would hold him for the brigade's board anyhow, and he intended to get what entertainment he could out of the boys. He said with his old-time pleasant twinkle that he meant to survey them into Utah and then telegraph bring him to hang them for trespass. The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room. Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest looking desperados the animal world can furnish. If their glass prison houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and spoiling for a fight in a minute. Starchy? Proud? Indeed, they would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress. There was as usual a furious Zephyr blowing the first night of the brigade's return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew off, and a corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch. There was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow aisle between the bed-rows. In the midst of the turmoil Bob H. sprung up out of a sound sleep and knocked down a shelf with his head. Instantly he shouted, Turn out, boys, the tarantulas is loose! No warning ever sounded so dreadful. Nobody tried any longer to leave the room, lest he might step on a tarantula. Every man groped for a trunk or a bed, and jumped on it, then followed the strangest silence. A silence of grisly suspense it was, too, waiting, expectancy, fear. It was as dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those 14 scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a thing could be seen. Then came occasional little interruptions of the silence, and one could recognize a man and tell his locality by his voice, or locate any other sound a sufferer made by his gropings or changes of position. The occasional voices were not given to much speaking. You simply heard a gentle ejaculation of ow, followed by a solid thump, and you knew the gentleman had felt a hairy blanket or something touched his bare skin and had skipped from a bed to the floor. Another silence. Presently you would hear a gasping voice say, Something's crawling up the back of my neck! Every now and then you could hear a little subdued scramble and a sorrowful, Oh Lord! And then you knew that somebody was getting away from something he took for a tarantula, and not losing any time about it either. Directly a voice in the corner rang out, wild and clear, I've got him! I've got him! Pause, and probable change of circumstances. No. No, he's got me. Oh, ain't they never going to fetch a lantern? The lantern came at that moment in the hands of Mrs. O'Flanigan, whose anxiety to know the amount of damage done by the assaulting-roof had not prevented her waiting a judicious interval after getting out of bed and lighting up, to see if the wind was done now, upstairs, or had a larger contract. The landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room was picturesque, and might have been funny to some people, but was not to us. Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks, and beds, and so strangely attired too, we were too earnestly distressed and too genuinely miserable to see any fun about it, and there was not the semblance of a smile anywhere visible. I know I am not capable of suffering more than I did during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas. I had skipped from bed to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every time I touched anything that was fursy, I fancied I felt the fangs. I had rather go to war than live that episode over again. Nobody was hurt. The man who thought a tarantula had got him was mistaken. Only a crack in a box had caught his finger. Not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. There were ten or twelve of them. We took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success. Did we go back to bed then? We did nothing of the kind. Money could not have persuaded us to do it. We sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy. CHAPTER XXII It was the end of August and the skies were cloudless and the weather superb. In two or three weeks I had grown wonderfully fascinated with a curious new country and concluded to put off my return to the state for a while. I had grown well accustomed to wearing a damaged slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, and pants crammed into boot tops and gloried in the absence of coat, vest, and braces. I felt rowdyish and bully, as the historian Josephus phrases it, in his fine chapter upon the destruction of the temple. It seemed to me that nothing could be so fine and so romantic. I had become an officer of the government, but that was for mere sublimity. The office was a unique sinecure. I had nothing to do and no salary. I was private secretary to His Majesty the Secretary, and there was not yet writing enough for two of us. So Johnny K. and I devoted our time to amusement. He was the young son of an Ohio nabob and was out there for recreation. He got it. We had heard a world of talk about the marvelous beauty of Lake Tahoe, and finally curiosity drove us thither to see it. Three or four members of the brigade had been there and located some timber-lands on its shores and stored up a quantity of provisions in their camp. We strapped a couple of blankets on our shoulders and took an axe apiece and started, for we intended to take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy. We were on foot. The reader will find it advantageous to go horseback. We were told that the distance was eleven miles. We tramped a long time on level ground and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over. No lake there. We descended on the other side, crossed the valley, and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again. No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring and hired a couple of Chinaman to curse those people who had beguiled us. Thus refreshed we presently resumed the march with renewed vigor and determination. We plotted on two or three hours longer and at last the lake burst upon us. A noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still. It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in travelling around it. As it lay there, with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords. We found the small skiff belonging to the brigade boys and, without loss of time, set out across a deep bend of the lake toward the landmarks that signified the locality of the camp. I got Johnny to row, not because I mind exertion myself, but because it makes me sick to ride backwards when I am at work. But I steered. A three-mile pole brought us to the camp just as the night fell, and we stepped ashore very tired and wolfishly hungry. In a cache among the rocks we found the provisions and the cooking utensils, and then all fatigued as I was I sat down on a boulder and super-intended while Johnny gathered wood and cooked supper. Many a man who had gone through what I had would have wanted to rest. It was a delicious supper, hot bread, fried bacon, and black coffee. It was a delicious solitude we were in too. Three miles away was a sawmill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings throughout the wide circumference of the lake. As the darkness closed down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our pains. In due time we spread our blankets and the warm sand between two large boulders and soon fell asleep. Careless of the procession of ants that passed in through wrents in our clothing and explored our persons, nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us for it had been fairly earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had to adjourn court for that night, anyway. The wind rose just as we were losing consciousness and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf upon the shore. It is always very cold on that lakeshore in the night, but we had plenty of blankets and were warm enough. We never moved a muscle all night, but waked at early dawn in the original positions and got up at once thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness. There is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience. That morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before, sick ones at any rate, but the world is slow and people will go to water cures and movement cures and to foreign lands for health. Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones. The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. But why shouldn't it be? It is the same of the angels' breath. I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a roof, but under the sky. It seldom or never rains there in the summertime. I know a man who went there to die. But he made a failure of it. He was a skeleton when he came and could barely stand. He had no appetite and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future. Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he could hold three times a day and chasing game over mountains three thousand feet high for recreation. And he was a skeleton no longer, but weighed part of a ton. This is no fancy sketch, but the truth. His disease was consumption. I confidently commend his experience to other skeletons. I superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in the boat and skirted along the lakeshore about three miles and disembarked. We liked the appearance of the place and so we claimed some three hundred acres of it and stuck our notices on a tree. It was yellow pine timberland, a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and from one to five feet through at the butt. It was necessary to fence our property or we could not hold it. That is to say, it was necessary to cut down trees here and there and make them fall in such a way as to form a sort of enclosure with pretty wide gaps in it. We cut down three trees apiece and found at such heartbreaking work that we decided to rest our case on those. If they held the property well and good, if they didn't, let the property spill out through the gaps and go. It was no use to work ourselves to death merely to save a few acres of land. Next day we came back to build a house, for a house was also necessary in order to hold the property. We decided to build a substantial log house and excite the envy of the brigade boys, but by the time we had cut and trimmed the first log it seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate and so we concluded to build it of saplings. However, two saplings, duly cut and trimmed, compelled the recognition of the fact that a still-modest architecture would satisfy the law and so we concluded to build a brush house. We devoted the next day to this work, but we did so much sitting around and discussing that by the middle of the afternoon we had achieved only a half-way sort of affair, which one of us had to watch while the other cut brush, lest if both turned our backs we might not be able to find it again. It had such a strong family resemblance to the surrounding vegetation, but we were satisfied with it. We were land owners now, duly seized and possessed and within the protection of the law. Therefore we decided to take up our residence on our own domain and enjoy that large sense of independence which only such an experience can bring. Late the next afternoon after a good long rest we sailed away from the brigade camp with all the provisions and cooking utensils we could carry off. Borrow is the more accurate word, and just as the night was falling we beached the boat at our own landing. If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch for the next two or three weeks, it must be some sort of life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person. We did not see a human being but ourselves during the time, or hear any sounds but those that were made by the wind and the waves, the sighing of the pines, and now and then the far-off thunder of an avalanche. The forest about us was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and breezy, or black and storm-tossed according to nature's mood, and its circling border of mountain domes closed with forests scarred with landslides, cloven with canyons and valleys, and helmeted with glittering snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture. The view was always fascinating, bewitching and trancing. The eye was never tired of gazing night or day in calm or storm. It suffered but one grief, and that was that it could not look always but must close sometimes in sleep. We slept in the sand close to the water's edge, between two protecting boulders which took care of the stormy night winds for us. We never took any paragoric to make us sleep. At the first break of dawn we were always up and running foot races to tone down excess of physical vigor and exuberance of spirits. That is, Johnny was, but I held his hat. While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows and set the captive crags and forests free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete. Then to business. That is, drifting around in the boat. We were on the north shore. There the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white. This gives the marvellous transparency of the water a fuller advantage than it has elsewhere on the lake. We usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from shore, and then lay down on the thwarps in the sun and let the boat drift by the hour wither it would. We seldom talked. It interrupted the Sabbath stillness and marred the dreams the luxurious rest and indolence brought. But sure all along was indented with deep curved bays and coves bordered by narrow sand beaches, and where the sand ended the steep mountain sides rose right up aloft into space, rose up like a vast wall a little out of perpendicular and thickly wooded with tall pines. So singularly clear was the water that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air. Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite boulder as large as a village church would start out of the bottom apparently and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface till presently it threatened to touch our faces and we could not resist the impulse to seize an ore and avert the danger. But the boat would float on and the boulder descend again and then we could see that when we had been exactly above it it must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the surface. Down through the transparency of these great depths the water was not merely transparent but dazzlingly brilliantly so. All objects seen through it had a bright strong vividness not only of outline but of every minute detail which they would not have had when seen simply through the same depths of atmosphere. So empty and airy did all spaces seem below us and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in mid-nothingness that we call these boat excursions balloon voyages. We fished a good deal but we did not average one fish a week. We could see trout by the thousand winging about him the emptiness under us or sleeping in shoals on the bottom but they would not bite. They could see the line too plainly perhaps. We frequently selected the trout we wanted and rested the bait patiently and persistently on the end of his nose at a depth of eighty feet but he would only shake it off with an annoying manner and shift his position. We bathed occasionally but the water was rather chilly for it all looked so sunny. Sometimes we rode out to the blue water a mile or two from shore. It was as dead blue as indigo there because of the immense depth. By official measurement the lake in its center is one thousand five hundred and twenty-five feet deep. Sometimes on lazy afternoons we lulled on the sand in camp and smoked pipes and read some old well-worn novels. At night by the campfire we played yuker and seven up to strengthen the mind and played them with cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer's acquaintance with them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of diamonds. We never slept in our house. It never recurred to us for one thing and besides it was built to hold the ground and that was enough. We did not wish to strain it. By and by our provisions began to run short and we went back to the old camp and laid in a new supply. We were gone all day and reached home again about nightfall, pretty tired and hungry. While Johnny was carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our house for future use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee pot ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to get the frying pan. While I was at this I heard a shout from Johnny and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises. Johnny was on the other side of it. He had to run through the flames to get to the lake shore and then we stood helpless and watched the devastation. The ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine needles and the fire touched them off as if they were gunpowder. It was wonderful to see with what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled. My coffee pot was gone and everything with it. In a minute and a half the fire seized upon a dense growth of dry Manzanita Chaparro six or eight feet high and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific. We were driven to the boat by the intense heat and there we remained, spellbound. Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame. It went surging up adjacent ridges, surmounted them, and disappeared in the cannons beyond. Burst into view upon higher and farther ridges presently. Shed agrander, illumination abroad and dove again, flamed out again, directly higher and still higher up the mountain side, threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and then sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and gorges till as far as the eye could reach the lofty mountain fronts were webbed, as it were, with a tangled network of red lava streams. Away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy glare and the firmament above was a reflected hell. Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake. Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful, but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held it with a stronger fascination. We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours. We never thought of supper and never felt fatigue. But at eleven o'clock the conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision and then darkness stole down upon the landscape again. Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat. The provisions were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see. We were homeless wanderers again without any property. Our fence was gone. Our house burned down. No insurance. Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead trees all burned up, and our broad acres of Manzanita swept away. Our blankets were on our usual sand bed, however, and so we lay down and went to sleep. The next morning we started back to the old camp, but while out a long way from shore so great a storm came up that we dared not try to land. So I bailed out the seas we shipped, and Johnny pulled heavily through the billows till we had reached a point three or four miles beyond the camp. The storm was increasing and it became evident that it was better to take the hazard of beaching the boat than go down in the hundred fathoms of water. So we ran in, with tall white caps following, and I sat down in the stern sheets and pointed her head on to the shore. The instant the bow struck a wave came over the stern that washed crew and cargo ashore and saved a deal of trouble. We shivered in the lee of a boulder all the rest of the day and froze all the night through. In the morning the tempest had gone down and we paddled down to the camp without any unnecessary delay. We were so starved that we ate up the rest of the brigade's provisions and then set out to Carson to tell them about it and ask their forgiveness. It was accorded upon payment of damages. We made many trips to the lake after that and had many a hair-breath escape and blood curdling adventure which will never be recorded in any history. I had never seen such wild, free, magnificent horsemanship outside of a circus as these picturesquely clad Mexicans, Californians and Mexicanized Americans displayed in Carson streets every day. How they rode, leaning just gently forward out of the perpendicular, easy and nonchalant with broad slouch-hat brim-blown square up in front and long riata swinging above the head, they swept through the town like the wind. The next minute they were only a sailing puff of dust on a far desert. If they trotted they sat up gallantly and gracefully and seemed part of the horse. Did not go jiggering up and down after the silly Miss Nancy fashion of the riding schools. I had quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow and was full of anxiety to learn more. I was resolved to buy a horse. While the thought was rankling in my mind, the auctioneer came scurrying through the plaza on a black beast that had as many humps and corners on him as a dromedary and was necessarily uncommonly, but he was going, going at twenty-two, horse-saddle and bridle at twenty-two dollars, gentlemen, and I could hardly resist. A man whom I did not know, he turned out to be the auctioneer's brother, noticed the wistful look in my eye, and observed that that was a very remarkable horse to be going at such a price, and added that the saddle alone was worth the money. It was a Spanish saddle with ponderous tapidaros and furnished with the ungainly sole leather covering with the unspellable name. I said I had half a notion to bid. Then this keen-eyed person appeared to me to be taking my measure, but I dismissed the suspicion when he spoke, for his manner was full of guileless candor and truthfulness. Said he, I know that horse, know him well. You were a stranger, I take it, and so you might think he was an American horse, maybe. But I assure you he is not. He is nothing of the kind. But, excuse my speaking in a low voice, other people being near, he is, without the shadow of a doubt, a genuine Mexican plug. I did not know what a genuine Mexican plug was, but there was something about this man's way of saying it that made me swear inwardly that I would own a genuine Mexican plug or die. Has he any other advantages, I inquired, suppressing what eagerness I could? He hooked his forefinger in the pocket of my army-shirt, led me to one side and breathed in my ear impressively these words. He can outbuck anything in America. Going, going, going, at twenty-t-four dollars and a half gen twenty-seven I shouted in a frenzy, and sold, said the auctioneer, and passed over the genuine Mexican plug to me. I could scarcely contain my exaltation. I paid the money, and put the animal in a neighboring livery stable to dine and rest himself. In the afternoon I brought the creature into the plaza, and certain citizens held him by the head, and others by the tail, while I mounted him. As soon as they let go, he placed all his feet in a bunch together, lowered his back, and then suddenly arched it upward, and shot me straight into the air a matter of three or four feet. I came as straight down again, lit in the saddle, went instantly up again, came down almost on the high pommel, shot up again, and came down on the horse's neck, all in the space of three or four seconds. Then he rose and stood almost straight up on his hind feet, and I, clasping his lean neck desperately, slid back into the saddle and held on. He came down, and immediately hoisted his heels into the air, delivering a vicious kick at the sky, and stood on his forefeet. Then down he came once more, and began the original exercise of shooting me straight up again. The third time I went up I heard a stranger say, Whoa! Don't he buck, though! While I was up somebody struck the horse a-sounding thwack with a leathern strap, and when I arrived again the genuine Mexican plug was not there. A California youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if he might have a ride. I granted him that luxury. He mounted the genuine, got lifted into the air once, but sent his spurs home as he descended, and the horse darted away like a telegram. He soared over three fences like a bird, and disappeared down the road toward the Washu Valley. I sat down on a stone with a scy, and by a natural impulse one of my hands sought my forehead, and the other the base of my stomach. I believe I never appreciated till then the poverty of the human machinery, for I still needed a hand or two to place elsewhere. Penn cannot describe how I was jolted up. Imagination cannot conceive how disjointed I was, how internally, externally, and universally I was unsettled, mixed up, and ruptured. There was a sympathetic crowd round me, though. One elderly-looking comforter said, Stranger, you've been taken in. Everybody in this camp knows that horse. Any child, any engine, could have told you that he'd buck. He is the very worst devil to buck on the continent of America. You hear me? I'm Currie, old Currie, old Abe Currie, and more over he is a Simon-pure, out-and-out genuine, jammed Mexican plug, and an uncommon mean one at that too. Why, you turnip, if you had laid low and kept dark, there's chances to buy an American horse for mighty little more than you paid for that bloody old foreign relic. I gave no sign. But I made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's funeral took place while I was in the territory, I would postpone all other recreations and attend it. After a gallop of sixteen miles, the Californian youth and the genuine Mexican plug came tearing into town again, shedding foam flakes like the spume spray that drives before a typhoon, and with one final skip over a wheelbarrow and a Chinaman cast anchor in front of the ranch. Such panting and blowing, such spreading and contracting of the red equine nostrils and glaring of the wild equine eye. But was the imperial beast subjugated? Indeed he was not. His lordship, the speaker of the house, thought he was, and mounted him to go down to the capital. But the first dash the creature made was over a pile of telegraph poles half as high as a church, and his time to the capital, one mile and three quarters, remains unbeaten to this day. But then he took an advantage, he left out the mile, and only did the three quarters. That is to say he made a straight cut across lots, preferring fences and ditches to a crooked road, and when the speaker got to the capital he said he had been in the air so much he felt as if he had made the trip on a comet. In the evening the speaker came home afoot, for exercise, and got the genuine, towed back behind a quartz wagon. The next day I loaned the animal to the clerk of the house to go down to the Dana Silver Mine six miles, and he walked back for exercise, and got the horse towed. Everybody I loaned him to always walked back. They never could get enough exercise any other way. Still, I continued to loan him to anybody who was willing to borrow him, my idea being to get him crippled, and throw him on the borrower's hands, or killed, and make the borrower pay for him. But somehow nothing ever happened to him. He took chances that no other horse ever took and survived, but he always came out safe. It was his daily habit to try experiments that had always before been considered impossible, but he always got through. Sometimes he miscalculated a little and did not get his rider through intact, but he always got through himself. Of course I had tried to sell him, but that was a stretch of simplicity which met with little sympathy. The auctioneer stormed up and down the streets on him for four days, dispersing the populace, interrupting business, and destroying children, and never got a bid. At least never any, but the $18 one he hired a notoriously substanceless bummer to make. The people only smiled pleasantly and restrained their desire to buy if they had any. Then the auctioneer brought in his bill, and I withdrew the horse from the market. We tried to trade him off at Private Vendu, next offering him at a sacrifice for secondhand tombstones, old iron, temperance tracks, any kind of property. But holders were stiff, and we retired from the market again. I never tried to ride the horse any more. Walking was good enough exercise for a man like me that had nothing to do with him except ruptures, internal injuries, and such things. Finally I tried to give him away, but it was a failure. Parties said earthquakes were handy enough on the Pacific coast. They did not wish to own one. As a last resort I offered him to the governor for the use of the brigade. His face lit up eagerly at first, but toned down again, and he said the thing would be too palpable. Just then the livery-stable man brought in his bill for six weeks keeping. Stall room for the horse, $15. Hey, for the horse, $250. The genuine Mexican plug had eaten a ton of the article, and the man said he would have eaten a hundred if he had let him. I will remark here, in all seriousness, that the regular price of hay during that year and a part of the next was really $250 a ton. During a part of the previous year it had sold at $500 a ton, in gold, and during the winter before that there was a scarcity of the article that in several instances small quantities had brought $800 a ton in corn. The consequence might be guessed without my telling it. People turned their stock loose to starve, and before the spring arrived Carson and Eagle Valleys were almost literally carpeted with their carcasses. Any old settler there will verify these statements. I managed to pay the livery-bill, and that same day I gave the genuine Mexican plug to a passing Arkansas immigrant whom Fortune delivered into my hand. If this ever meets his eye he will doubtless remember the donation. Now whoever has had the luck to ride a real Mexican plug will recognize the animal depicted in this chapter and hardly consider him exaggerated. But the uninitiated will feel justified in regarding his portrait as a fancy sketch, perhaps. End of Chapter 24 This is Chapter 25 of Roughing It This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It By Mark Twain Chapter 25 Originally Nevada was a part of Utah and was called Carson County, and a pretty large county it was, too. Certain of its valleys produced no end of hay, and this attracted small colonies of Mormon stockraisers and farmers to them. A few Orthodox Americans straggled in from California, but no love was lost between the two classes of colonists. There was little or no friendly intercourse. Each party stayed to itself. The Mormons were largely in the majority and had the additional advantage of being peculiarly under the protection of the Mormon government of the territory. Therefore, they could afford to be distant and even peremptory toward their neighbors. One of the traditions of Carson Valley illustrates the condition of things that prevailed at the time I speak of. The hired girl of one of the American families was Irish and a Catholic. Yet it was noted with surprise that she was the only person outside of the Mormon ring who could get favors from the Mormons. She asked kindnesses of them often and always got them. It was a mystery to everybody. But one day, as she was passing out at the door, a large bowie knife dropped from under her apron and when her mistress asked for an explanation she observed that she was going out to borrow a wash tub from the Mormons. In 1858, silver loads were discovered in Carson County and then the aspect of things changed. Californians began to flock in and the American element was soon in the majority. Allegiance to bring them young and Utah was renounced and a temporary territorial government for a wash shoe was instituted by the citizens. Governor Roup was the first and only chief magistrate of it. In due course of time Congress passed a bill to organize Nevada Territory and President Lincoln sent out Governor Nye to supplant Roup. At this time the population of the territory was about 12 or 15,000 and rapidly increasing. Silver mines were being vigorously developed and silver mills erected. Business of all kinds was active and prosperous and growing more so day by day. The people were glad to have a legitimately constituted government but did not particularly enjoy having strangers from distant states put in authority over them, a sentiment that was natural enough. They thought the officials should have been chosen from among themselves, from among prominent citizens who had earned a right to such promotion and who would be in sympathy with the populace and likewise thoroughly acquainted with the needs of the territory. They were right in viewing the matter thus, without doubt, the new officers were immigrants and that was no title to anybody's affection or admiration either. The new government was received with considerable coolness. It was not only a foreign intruder but a poor one. It was not even worth plucking, except by the smallest of small fry office-seekers and such. Everybody knew that Congress had appropriated only $20,000 a year in greenbacks for its support, about money enough to run a court's mill a month. And everybody knew also that the first year's money was still in Washington, and that the getting hold of it would be a tedious and difficult process. Carson City was too wary and too wise to open up a credit account with the imported bantling with anything like indecent haste. There is something solemnly funny about the struggles of a newborn territorial government to get a start in this world. Ours had a trying time of it. The Organic Act and the Instructions from the State Department commanded that a legislature should be elected at such and such a time and its sittings inaugurated at such and such a date. It was easy to get legislators, even at $3 a day, although board was $4.50. For distinction has its charms in Nevada as well as elsewhere, and there were plenty of patriotic souls out of employment, but to get a legislative hall for them to meet in was another matter all together. Carson blandly declined to give a room rent-free or let one to the government on credit. But when Currie heard of the difficulty he came forward solitary and alone, and shouldered the ship of state over the bar, and got her afloat again. I referred to Currie, old Currie, old Abe Currie. But for him the legislature would have been obliged to sit in the desert. He offered his large stone building just outside the capital limits, rent-free, and it was gladly accepted. Then he built a horse railroad from town to the capital and carried the legislators gratis. He also furnished pine benches and chairs for the legislature and covered the floors with clean sawdust by way of carpet and spittoon combined. But for Currie the government would have died in its tender infancy. The canvas partitioned to separate the Senate from the House of Representatives was put up by the Secretary at a cost of $3.40, but the United States declined to pay for it. Upon being reminded that the instructions permitted the payment of a liberal rent for a legislative hall, and that that money was saved to the country by Mr. Currie's generosity, the United States said that it did not alter the matter, and the $3.40 would be subtracted from the Secretary's $1,800 salary, and it was. The matter of printing was from the beginning an interesting feature of the new government's difficulties. The Secretary was sworn to obey his volume of written instructions, and these commanded him to do two certain things without fail. These, one, get the House and Senate journals printed, and two, for this work pay $1.50 per thousand for a composition and $1.50 per token for press work in greenbacks. It was easy to swear to do these two things, but it was entirely impossible to do more than one of them. When greenbacks had gone down to $0.40 on the dollar, the prices regularly charged everybody by printing establishments for $1.50 per thousand and $1.50 per token in gold. The instructions commanded that the Secretary regard a paper dollar issued by the government as equal to any other dollar issued by the government. Hence, the printing of the journals was discontinued. Then the United States sternly rebuked the Secretary for disregarding the instructions and warned him to correct his ways. Wherefore he got some printing done forward the bill to Washington with full exhibits of the high prices of things in the territory and called attention to a printed market report wherein it would be observed that even hay was $250 a ton. The United States responded by subtracting the printing bill from the Secretary's suffering salary, and moreover remarked with dense gravity that he would find nothing in his instructions requiring him to purchase hay. Nothing in this world is palled and such impenetrable obscurity as a U.S. Treasury Comptroller's understanding. The very fires of the hereafter could get up nothing more than a fitful glimmer in it. In the days I speak of, he never could be made to comprehend why it was that $20,000 would not go as far in Nevada where all commodities ranged at enormous figure as it would in the other territories where exceeding cheapness was the rule. He was an officer who looked out for the little expenses all the time. The Secretary of the territory kept his office in his bedroom, as I before remarked, and he charged the United States no rent, although his instructions provided for that item and he could have justly taken advantage of it, a thing which I would have done with more than lightning promptness if I had been Secretary myself. But the United States never applauded this devotion. Indeed, I think my country was ashamed to have so improvident a person in its employ. Those instructions, we used to read a chapter from them every morning as intellectual gymnastics and a couple of chapters in Sunday school every Sabbath, for they treated of all subjects under the sun and had much valuable religious matter in them along with the other statistics. Those instructions commanded that pen knives, envelopes, pens, and writing paper be furnished the members of the legislature, so the Secretary made the purchase and the distribution. The knives cost three dollars apiece. There was one too many, and the Secretary gave it to the clerk of the House of Representatives. The United States said the clerk of the House was not a member of the legislature and took that three dollars out of the Secretary's salary, as usual. White men charged three or four dollars a load for sewing up stovewood. The Secretary was sagacious enough to know that the United States would never pay any such price as that, so he got an Indian to sew up a load of office wood at one dollar and a half. He made out the usual voucher but signed no name to it, simply appended a note explaining that an Indian had done the work and had done it in a very capable and satisfactory way, but could not sign the voucher owing to lack of ability in the necessary direction. The Secretary had to pay that dollar and a half. He thought the United States would admire both his economy and his honesty in getting the work done at half price and not putting a pretended Indian signature to the voucher, but the United States did not see it in that light. The United States was too much accustomed to employing dollar and a half thieves in all manner of official capacities to regard his explanation of the voucher as having any foundation in fact. But the next time the Indian sawed wood for us I taught him to make a cross at the bottom of the voucher. It looked like a cross that had been drunk a year, and then I witnessed it and it went through all right. The United States never said a word. I was sorry I had not made the voucher for a thousand loads of wood instead of one. The government of my country snubs honest simplicity, but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two. That was a fine collection of sovereigns, that first Nevada legislature. They levied taxes to the amount of thirty or forty thousand dollars in order to expenditures to the extent of about a million. Yet they had their little periodical explosions of economy like all other bodies of the kind. A member proposed to save three dollars a day to the nation by dispensing with a chaplain. And yet that short-sighted man needed the chaplain more than any other member, perhaps, for he generally sat with his feet on his desk, eating raw turnips during that morning prayer. The legislature sat sixty days and passed private toll-road franchises all the time. When they adjourned it was estimated that every citizen owned about three franchises, and it was believed that unless Congress gave the territory another degree of longitude there would not be room enough to accommodate the toll-roads. The ends of them were hanging over the boundary lines everywhere like a fringe. The fact is, the freighting business had grown to such important proportions that there was nearly as much excitement over suddenly acquired toll-road fortunes as over the wonderful silver mines. End of Chapter 25 This is Chapter 26 of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It By Mark Twain Chapter 26 By and by I was smitten with the silver fever. Prospecting parties were leaving for the mountains every day, and discovering and taking possession of rich, silver-bearing loads and ledges of quartz. Plainly this was the road to fortune. The great Gould and Currie mine was held at three or four hundred dollars a foot when we arrived, but in two months it had sprung up to eight hundred. The oafir had been worth only a mere trifle a year gone by, and now it was selling at nearly four thousand dollars a foot. Not a mine could be named that had not experienced an astonishing advance in value within a short time. Everybody was talking about these marvels. Go where you would. You heard nothing else from morning till far into the night. Tom so-and-so had sold out of the Amanda Smith for forty thousand dollars, had an ascent when he took up the ledge six months ago. John Jones had sold half his interest in the Bald Eagle and Marianne for sixty-five thousand gold coin, and gone to the states for his family. The widow Brewster had struck it rich in the golden fleece and sold ten feet for eighteen thousand dollars. Hadn't money enough to buy a crepe bonnet when Sing Sing Tommy killed her husband at Baldy Johnson's wake last spring. The last chance had found a clay casing and knew they were right on the ledge. Consequence feet that went begging yesterday were worth a brick house apiece today, and seedy owners who could not get trusted for a drink at any bar in the country yesterday were roaring drunk on champagne today and hosts of warm personal friends in a town where they had forgotten how to bow or shake hands from long-continued want of practice. Johnny Morgan, a common loafer, had gone to sleep in the gutter and waked up worth a hundred thousand dollars in consequence of the decision in the Lady Franklin and rough-and-ready lawsuit, and so on day in and day out the talk pelted our ears and the excitement waxed hotter and hotter around us. I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest. Cartloads of solid silver bricks as large as pigs of lead were arriving from the mills every day, and such sights as that gave substance to the wild talk about me. I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the craziest. Every few days news would come of the discovery of a brand new mining region. Immediately the papers would team with accounts of its richness, and away the surplus population would scamper to take possession. By the time I was fairly inoculated with the disease Esmeralda had just had a run and Humboldt was beginning to shriek for attention. Humboldt, Humboldt was the new cry, and straightaway Humboldt, the newest of the new, the richest of the rich, the most marvelous of the marvelous discoveries in Silverland was occupying two columns of the public prints to Esmeralda's one. I was just on the point of starting to Esmeralda, but turned with the tide and got ready for Humboldt. That the reader may see what moved me and what would as surely have moved him had he been there, I insert here one of the newspaper letters of the day. It and several other letters from the same calm hand were the main means of converting me. I shall not garble the extract, but put it in just as it appeared in the daily territorial enterprise. What about our minds? I shall be candid with you. I shall express an honest opinion, based upon a thorough examination. Humboldt County is the richest mineral region upon God's footstool. Each mountain range is gorged with a precious oars. Humboldt is the true Golganda. The other day an assay of near croppings yielded exceeding $4,000 to the tonne. A week or two ago an assay of just such surface developments made returns of $7,000 to the tonne. Our mountains are full of rambling prospectors. Each day and almost every hour reveals new and more startling evidences of the profuse and intensified wealth of our favored county. The metal is not silver alone. There are distinct ledges of oriferous ore. A late discovery plainly evinces Cinnabar. The coarser metals are in gross abundance. Lately evidences of bituminous coal have been detected. My theory has ever been that coal is a lignious formation. I told Colonel Whitman in Times Pass that the neighborhood of Dayton, Nevada, betrayed no present or previous manifestations of a lignious foundation, and that hence I had no confidence in his lauded coal mines. I repeated the same doctrine to the exultant coal discoverers of Humboldt. I talked with my friend Captain Birch on the subject. My pironism vanished upon his statement that in the very region referred to, he had seen petrified trees of the length of two hundred feet. Then is the fact established that huge forests once cast their grim shadows over this remote section. I am firm in the coal faith. Have no fears of the mineral resources of Humboldt County. They are immense, incalculable. Let me state one or two things which will help the reader to better comprehend certain items in the above. At this time our near neighbor Gold Hill was the most successful silver-mining locality in Nevada. It was from there that more than half the daily shipments of silver bricks came. Very rich, and scarce, Gold Hill ore yielded from one hundred to four hundred dollars to the ton. But the usual yield was only twenty to forty dollars per ton. That is to say each hundred pounds of ore yielded from one dollar to two dollars. But the reader will perceive by the above extract that in Humboldt from one fourth to nearly half the mass was silver. That is to say every one hundred pounds of the ore had from two hundred dollars up to three hundred and fifty in it. Some days later this same correspondent wrote, I have spoken of the vast and almost fabulous wealth of this region. It is incredible. The intestines of our mountains are gorged with precious ore to plethora. I have said that nature has so shaped our mountains as to furnish most excellent facilities for the working of our mines. I have also told you that the country about here is pregnant with the finest mill sites in the world. But what is the mining history of Humboldt? The sheba mine is in the hands of energetic San Francisco capitalists. It would seem that the ore is combined with metals that render it difficult of reduction with our imperfect mountain machinery. The proprietors have combined the capital and labor hinted at in my Exordium. They are toiling and probing. Their tunnel has reached the length of one hundred feet. From primal assays alone, coupled with the development of the mine and public confidence in the continuance of effort, the stock had reared itself to eight hundred dollars market value. I do not know that one ton of the ore has been converted into current metal. I do know that there are many loads in this section that surpass the sheba in primal assay value. Listen a moment to the calculations of the sheba operators. They propose transporting the ore concentrated to Europe. The conveyance from Star City, its locality, to Virginia City will cost seventy dollars per ton. From Virginia to San Francisco, forty dollars per ton. From thence to Liverpool, its destination, ten dollars per ton. Their idea is that its conglomerate metals will reimburse them their cost of original extraction, the price of transportation, and the expense of reduction, and that then a ton of the raw ore will net them twelve hundred dollars. The estimate may be extravagant, cut it in twain, and the product is enormous, far transcending any previous developments of our racy territory. A very common calculation is that many of our mines will yield five hundred dollars to the ton. Such fecundity throws the golden curry, the oafre, and the Mexican of our neighborhood in the darkest shadow. I have given you the estimate of the value of a single developed mine. Its richness is indexed by its market valuation. The people of Humboldt County are feet crazy. As I write, our towns are near deserted. They look as languid as a consumptive girl. What has become of our sinewy and athletic fellow-citizens? They are coursing through ravines and over mountaintops. Their tracks are visible in every direction. Occasionally a horseman will dash among us. His steed betrays hard usage. He lights before his adobe dwelling, hastily exchanges courtesies with his townsmen, hurries to an assay office and from thence to the district recorders. In the morning, having renewed his provisional supplies, he is off again on his wild and unbeaten route. Why, the fellow numbers already his feet by the thousands. He is the horse leech. He has the craving stomach of the shark or anaconda. He would conquer metallic worlds. This is enough. The instant we had finished reading the above article, four of us decided to go to Humboldt. We commenced getting ready at once. And we also commenced upgrading ourselves for not deciding sooner. For we were in terror lest all the rich mines would be found and secured before we got there. And we might have to put up with ledges that would not yield more than two or three hundred dollars a ton, maybe. An hour before I would have felt opulent if I had owned ten feet in a gold hill mine whose ore produced twenty-five dollars to the ton. Now I was already annoyed at the prospect of having to put up with mines the poorest of which would be a marvel in gold hill. Hurry, was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of four persons, a blacksmith, sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We put eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon. The horses were so weak and old that we soon found that it would be better if one or two of us got out and walked. It was an improvement. Next we found that it would be better if a third man got out. That was an improvement also. It was at this time that I volunteered to drive, although I had never driven a harnessed horse before and many a man in such a position would have felt fairly excused from such a responsibility. But in a little while it was found that it would be a fine thing if the driver got out and walked also. It was at this time that I resigned the position of driver and never resumed it again. Within the hour we found that it would not only be better but was absolutely necessary that we four taking turns, two at a time, should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push it through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little to do but keep out of the way and hold up the tongue. Perhaps it is well for one to know his fate at first and get reconciled to it. We had learned ours in one afternoon. It was plain that we had to walk through the sand and shove that wagon and those horses two hundred miles. So we accepted the situation and from that time forth we never rode. More than that we stood regular and nearly constant watches pushing up behind. We made seven miles and camped in the desert. Young Claggett, now member of Congress from Montana, unharnessed and fed and watered the horses. Olafant and I cut sagebrush, built the fire and brought water to cook with, and old Mr. Blue, the blacksmith, did the cooking. This division of labor and this appointment was adhered to throughout the journey. We had no tent and so we slept under our blankets in the open plain. We were so tired that we slept soundly. We were fifteen days making the trip two hundred miles. Thirteen rather, for we lay by a couple of days in one place to let the horses rest. We could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if we had towed the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of that until it was too late and so went on shoving the horses and the wagon too when we might have saved half the labor. Parties who met us occasionally advised us to put the horses in the wagon, but Mr. Blue, through whose iron-clad earnestness no sarcasm could pierce, said that that would not do, because the provisions were exposed and would suffer, the horses being betuminous from long deprivation. The reader will excuse me from translating. What Mr. Blue customarily meant when he used a long word was a secret between himself and his maker. He was one of the best and kindest-hearted men that ever graced a humble sphere of life. He was gentleness and simplicity itself and unselfishness too. Although he was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself any heirs, privileges, or exemptions on that account. He did a young man's share of the work, and did his share of conversing and entertaining from the general standpoint of any age, not from the arrogant, overawing, summit height of sixty years. His one striking peculiarity was his parting Tony in fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was proposing to convey. He always let his ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness. In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something when they really meant nothing in the world. If a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man's love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or a subject and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning. We four always spread our common stock of blankets together on the frozen ground and slept side by side, and finding that our foolish long-legged hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him, Olivant got to admitting him to the bed between himself and Mr. Blue, hugging the dog's warm back to his breast and finding great comfort in it. But in the night the pup would get stretchy and brace his feet against the old man's back and shove, grunting complacently the while, and now and then, being warm and snug, grateful and happy, he would paw the old man's back simply in excess of comfort, and at yet other times he would dream of the chase and, in his sleep, tug at the old man's back hair and bark in his ear. The old gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities at last, and when he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as that was not a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was so meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions. We turned the dog out. It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side, for after each day was done and our wolfish hunger appeased with a hot supper of fried bacon, bread, molasses, and black coffee, the pipe-smoking, song-singing, and yarn spinning around the evening campfire in the still solitudes of the desert was a happy, carefree sort of recreation that seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury. It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or country-bread. We are descended from desert lounging Arabs, and countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct. We all confess to a gratified thrill at the thought of camping out. Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made forty miles through the great American desert, and ten miles beyond, fifty and all, in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink, or rest, to stretch out and go to sleep even on stony and frozen ground after pushing a wagon and two horses fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that for the moment it almost seems cheap at the price. We camped two days in the neighborhood of the Sink of the Humboldt. We tried to use the strong alkaline water of the Sink, but it would not answer. It was like drinking lye, and not weak lye either. It left a taste in the mouth, bitter and every way execrable, and a burning in the stomach that was very uncomfortable. We put molasses in it, but that helped it very little. We added a pickle, yet the alkali was the prominent taste, and so it was unfit for drinking. The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man has yet invented. It was really vileer to the taste than the un-ameliorated water itself. Mr. Blue, being in the architect and builder of the beverage, felt constrained to endorse and uphold it, and so drank half a cup, by little sips, making shift to praise it faintly the while. But finally threw out the remainder and said frankly it was too technical for him. But presently we found a spring of fresh water convenient, and then, with nothing to mar our enjoyment and no stragglers to interrupt it, we entered into our rest. After leaving the sink we travelled along the humble river a little way. People accustomed to the monster-mile-wide Mississippi grow accustomed to associating the term river with a high degree of watery grandeur. Consequently such people feel rather disappointed when they stand on the shores of the Humboldt, or the Carson, and find that a river in Nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of the eerie canal in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and four times as deep. One of the pleasantest and most invigorating exercises one can contrive is to run and jump across the Humboldt River till he is overheated, and then drink it dry. On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and entered Unionville Humboldt County in the midst of a driving snowstorm. Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty pole. Six of the cabins were strung along one side of a deep canyon, and the other five faced them. The rest of the landscape was made up of bleak mountain walls that rose so high into the sky from both sides of the canyon that the village was left, as it were, far down in the bottom of a crevice. It was always daylight on the mountaintops a long time before the darkness lifted and revealed Unionville. We built a small, rude cabin in the side of the crevice and roofed it with canvas, leaving a corner open to serve as a chimney, through which the cattle used to tumble occasionally at night and mash our furniture and interrupt our sleep. It was very cold weather and fuel was scarce. Indians brought brush and bushes several miles on their backs, and when we could catch a laden Indian it was well, and when we could not, which was the rule, not the exception. We shivered and bore it. I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground. I expected to see it glittering in the sun on the mountain summits. I said nothing about this, for some instinct told me that I might possibly have an exaggerated idea about it, and so if I betrayed my thought I might bring derision upon myself. Yet I was as perfectly satisfied in my own mind as I could be of anything that I was going to gather up, in a day or two or at furthest a week or two, silver enough to make me satisfactorily wealthy, and so my fancy was already busy with plans for spending this money. The first opportunity that offered, I sauntered carelessly away from the cabin, keeping an eye on the other boys, and stopping and contemplating the sky when they seemed to be observing me. But as soon as the coast was manifestly clear, I fled away as guiltily as a thief might have done, and never halted till I was far beyond sight and call. Then I began my search with a feverish excitement that was brimful of expectation, almost of certainty. I crawled about the ground, seizing and examining bits of stone, blowing the dust from them, or rubbing them on my clothes, and then peering at them with anxious hope. Presently I found a bright fragment and my heart bounded. I hid behind a boulder and polished it and scrutinized it with a nervous eagerness and a delight that was more pronounced than absolute certainty itself could have afforded. The more I examined the fragment, the more I was convinced that I had found a door to fortune. I marked the spot and carried away my specimen. Up and down the rugged mountainside I searched with always increasing interest and always augmenting gratitude that I had come to Humboldt and come in time. Of all the experiences of my life, this secret search among the hidden treasures of Silverland was the nearest unmarred ecstasy. It was a delirious revel. By and by, in the bed of a shallow rivulet, I found a deposit of shining yellow scales and my breath almost forsook me. A gold mine, and in my simplicity I had been content with vulgar silver. I was so excited that I half believed my overwrought imagination was deceiving me. Then a fear came upon me that people might be observing me and would guess my secret. Moved by this thought, I made a circuit of the place and ascended a knoll to reconnoiter. Solitude! No creature was near. Then I returned to my mine, fortifying myself against possible disappointment, but my fears were groundless. The shining scales were still there. I set about scooping them out, and for an hour I toiled down the windings of the stream and robbed its bed. But at last the descending sun warned me to give up the quest, and I turned homeward, laden with wealth. As I walked along I could not help smiling at the thought of my being so excited over my fragment of silver when a nobler metal was almost under my nose. In this little time the former had so fallen in my estimation that once or twice I was on the point of throwing it away. The boys were as hungry as usual but I could eat nothing. Neither could I talk. I was full of dreams and far away. Their conversation interrupted the flow of my fancy somewhat and annoyed me a little too. I despised the sordid and commonplace things they talked about, but as they proceeded it began to amuse me. It grew to be rare fun to hear them planning their poor little economies and sighing over possible privations and distresses when a gold mine all our own lay within sight of the cabin and I could point it out at any moment. Smothered hilarity began to oppress me presently. It was hard to resist the impulse to burst out with exaltation and reveal everything, but I did resist. I said within myself that I would filter the great news through my lips calmly and be serene as a summer morning while I watched its effect in their faces. I said, Where have you all been? Prospecting. What did you find? Nothing. Nothing. What do you think of the country? Can't tell yet, said Mr. Belu, who was an old gold miner and had likewise had considerable experience among the silver mines. Well, haven't you formed any sort of opinion? Yes, sort of a one. It's fair enough here, maybe, but overrated. Seven thousand dollar ledges are scarce, though. That sheba may be rich enough, but we don't own it. And besides the rock is so full of base metals that all the science in the world can't work it. We'll not starve here, but we'll not get rich, I'm afraid. So you think the prospect is pretty poor? No name for it. Well, we'd better go back, hadn't we? Oh, not yet. Of course not. We'll try at a riffle first. Suppose now this is merely a supposition, you know. Suppose you could find a ledge that would yield, say, a hundred and fifty dollars a ton. Would that satisfy you? Try us once, from the whole party. Or suppose, merely a supposition, of course, suppose you were to find a ledge that would yield two thousand dollars a ton. Would that satisfy you? Here, what do you mean? What are you coming at? Is there some mystery behind all this? Never mind. I'm not saying anything. You know perfectly well there are no rich minds here. Of course you do. Because you have been around and examined for yourselves. Anybody would know that, that has been around. But just for the sake of argument, suppose, in a kind of a general way, suppose some person were to tell you that two thousand dollar ledges were simply contemptible. Contemptible, understand? And that right yonder in sight of this very cabin there were piles of pure gold and pure silver, oceans of it, enough to make you all rich in twenty four hours. Come! I should say he was as crazy as a loon, said old balloon, but wild with excitement, nevertheless. Gentleman, said I. I don't say anything. I haven't been around, you know, and of course don't know anything. But all I ask of you is to cast your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it. And I tossed my treasure before them. There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over it under the candle-light. Then old blue said, Think of it. I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre. So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn. Moralizing I observed, then, that all that glitters is not gold. Mr. Blue said I could go further than that, and laid up among my treasures of knowledge that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned, then, once for all that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-brow metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that. CHAPTER XXIX True knowledge of the nature of silver mining came fast enough. We went out prospecting with Mr. Blue. We climbed the mountain sides and clambered among sage-brush, rocks, and snow till we were ready to drop with exhaustion, but found no silver nor yet any gold. Day after day we did this. Now and then we came upon holes burrowed a few feet into the Declevities and apparently abandoned, and now and then we found one or two listless men still burrowing, but there was no appearance of silver. These holes were the beginnings of tunnels, and the purpose was to drive them hundreds of feet into the mountain and some day tap the hidden ledge where the silver was, some day. It seemed far enough away and very hopeless and dreary. Day after day we toiled and climbed and searched and we younger partners grew sicker and still sicker of the promiseless toil. At last we halted under a beatling rampart of rock which projected from the earth high upon the mountain. Mr. Blue broke off some fragments with a hammer and examined them long and attentively with a small eyeglass, threw them away and broke off more, said this rock was quartz, and quartz was the sort of rock that contained silver. Contained it? I had thought that at least it would be caked on the outside of it like a kind of veneering. He still broke off pieces and critically examined them. Now and then wetting the piece with his tongue and applying the glass. At last he exclaimed, We've got it! We were full of anxiety in a moment. The rock was clean and white, where it was broken, and across it ran a ragged thread of blue. He said that that little thread had silver in it mixed with base metal, such as lead and antimony and other rubbish, and that there was a speck or two of gold visible. After a great deal of effort we managed to discern some little fine yellow specks and judge that a couple of tons of them massed together might make a gold dollar possibly. We were not jubilant, but Mr. Blue said there were worse ledges in the world than that. He saved what he called the richest piece of the rock in order to determine its value by the process called the fire assay. Then we named the mine Monarch of the Mountains. Modesty of nomenclature is not a prominent feature in the mines, and Mr. Blue wrote out and stuck up the following notice, preserving a copy to be entered upon the books in the mining recorder's office in the town. Notice! We the undersigned claim three claims of three hundred feet each and one for discovery on this silver-bearing quartz lead or load extending north and south from this notice with all its dips, spurs, and angles, variations, and sinuosities, together with fifty feet of ground on either side for working the same. We put our names to it and tried to feel that our fortunes were made, but when we talked the matter all over with Mr. Blue we felt depressed and dubious. He said that this surface quartz was not all there was of our mine, but that the wall or ledge of rock called the Monarch of the Mountains extended down hundreds and hundreds of feet into the earth. He illustrated by saying it was like a curb stone and maintained a nearly uniform thickness, say, twenty feet, away down into the bowels of the earth, and was perfectly distinct from the casing rock on each side of it, and that it kept to itself and maintained its distinctive character always, no matter how deep it extended into the earth, or how far it stretched itself through and across the hills and valleys. He said it might be a mile deep and ten miles long for all we knew, and that wherever we bored into it, above, ground, or below, we would find gold and silver in it, but no gold or silver in the meaner rock it was cased between. And he said that down in the great depths of the ledge was its richness, and the deeper it went the richer it grew. Therefore instead of working here on the surface, we must either bore down into the rock with a shaft till we came to where it was rich, say, a hundred feet or so, or else we must go down into the valley and bore a long tunnel into the mountain side and tap the ledge far under the earth. To do either was plainly the labor of months, for we could blast and bore only a few feet a day, some five or six. But this was not all. He said that after we got the ore out it must be hauled in wagons to a distant silver mill, ground up, and the silver extracted by a tedious and costly process. Our fortune seemed a century away. But we went to work. We decided to sink a shaft, so for a week we climbed the mountain laden with picks, drills, gads, crowbars, shovels, cans of blasting powder, and coils of fuse, and strove with might and mane. At first the rock was broken and loosed and we dug it up with picks and threw it out with shovels and the hole progressed very well. But the rock became more compact presently and gads and crowbars came into play. But shortly nothing could make an impression but blasting powder. That was the weariest work. One of us held the iron drill in its place and another would strike it with an eight-pound sledge. It was like driving nails on a large scale. In the course of an hour or two the drill would reach a depth of two or three feet, making a hole a couple of inches in diameter. We would put in a charge of powder, insert a half a yard of fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and run. When the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air we would go back and find about a bushel of that hard rebellious quartz jolted out. Nothing more. One week of this satisfied me. I resigned. Claget and Olyphant followed. Our shaft was only twelve feet deep. We decided that a tunnel was the thing we wanted. So we went down the mountainside and worked a week, at the end of which time we had blasted a tunnel about it deep enough to hide a hog's head in and judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the ledge. I resigned again and the other boys only held out one day longer. We decided that the tunnel was not what we wanted. We wanted a ledge that was already developed. There were none in the camp. We dropped the monarch for the time being. Meantime the camp was filling up with people and there was a constantly growing excitement about our humboldt minds. We fell victims to the epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more feet. We prospected and took up new claims, put notices on them, and gave them grand and deliquent names. We traded some of our feet for feet in other people's claims. In a little while we owned largely in the Gray Eagle, the Columbiana, the Branch Mint, the Maria Jane, the Universe, the Root Hog or Die, the Sampson and Delilah, the Treasure Trove, the Golconda, the Sultana, the Boomerang, the Great Republic, the Grand Mogul, and fifty other minds that had never been molested by a shovel or scratched with a pick. We had not less than thirty thousand feet apiece in their richest minds on earth, as the frenzied can't phrased it, and we were in debt to the butcher. We were stark mad with excitement, drunk with happiness, smothered under mountains of prospective wealth, arrogantly compassionate toward the plotting millions who knew not our marvellous canyon, but our credit was not good at the grocers. It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine. It was a beggar's revel. There was nothing doing in the district, no mining, no milling, no productive effort, no income, and not enough money in the entire camp to buy a corner lot in an eastern village hardly. And yet a stranger would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires. Prospecting parties swarmed out of town with the first flush of dawn, and swarmed in again at nightfall, laden with spoil. Rocks. Nothing but rocks. Every man's pockets were full of them. The floor of his cabin was littered with them. They were disposed and labelled rows on his shelves. I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand feet in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they'd believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars. And as often as any other way, they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in the world. Every man you met had his new mine to boast of, and his specimens ready, and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly back you into a corner and offer as a favour to you, not to him, to part with just a few feet in the Golden Age, or the Sarah Jane, or some other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a square meal with, as the phrase went. And you were never to reveal that he made you the offer at such a ruinous price for it was only out of friendship for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice. Then he would fish a piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around, as if he feared he might be way laid and robbed if caught with such wealth in his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an eyeglass to it, and exclaim, Look at that! Right there in that red dirt. See it? See the specks of gold? And the streak of silver? That's from the Uncle Abe. There's a hundred thousand tons like that in sight. Right in sight, mind you, and when we get down on it, and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the richest thing in the world. Look at the assay. I don't want you to believe me. Look at the assay! Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton. I little knew then that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of rock and get it assayed. Very often that piece, the size of the filbert, was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it, and yet the assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton of rubbish it came from. On such a system of assaying as that, the Humboldt world had gone crazy. On the authority of such assays its newspaper correspondence were frothing about rock worth four and seven thousand dollars a ton. And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations of a quoted correspondent whereby the oar is to be mined and shipped all the way to England, the metal is extracted and the gold and silver contents received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony, and other things in the oar being sufficient to pay all the expenses incurred? Everybody's head was full of such calculations as those, such raving insanity rather. Few people took work into their calculations, or outlay of money either, except the work and expenditures of other people. We never touched our tunnel or shaft again. Why? Because we judged that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining, which was not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining. Before leaving Carson the Secretary and I had purchased feet from various Esmeralda stragglers. We had expected immediate returns of bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant assessments instead. Demands for money were with to develop the said mines. These assessments had grown so oppressive that it seemed necessary to look into the matter personally. Therefore I projected a pilgrimage to Carson and thence to Esmeralda. I bought a horse and started, in company with Mr. Baloo and a gentleman named Olandorf, a Prussian, not the party who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched foreign grammars with their interminable repetitions of questions which never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation among human beings. We rode through a snowstorm for two or three days and arrived at Honey Lake Smith's, a sort of isolated inn on the Carson River. It was a two-story log house situated on a small knoll in the midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly Carson winds its melancholy way. Close to the house were the overland stage stables built of sun-dried bricks. There was not another building within several leagues of the place. Toward sunset about twenty hay wagons arrived and camped out around the house and all the teamsters came into supper, a very, very rough set. There were one or two overland stage drivers there also, and a half dozen vagabonds and stragglers. Consequently the house was well crowded. We walked out after supper and visited a small Indian camp in the vicinity. The Indians were in a great hurry about something and were packing up and getting away as fast as they could. In their broken English they said, By and by, heap water. And by the help of signs made us understand that in their opinion a flood was coming. The weather was perfectly clear, and this was not the rainy season. There was about a foot of water in the insignificant river, or maybe two feet. The stream was not wider than a back alley in a village, and its banks were scarcely higher than a man's head. So where was the flood to come from? We canvassed the subject a while and then concluded it was a ruse, and that the Indians had some better reason for leaving in a hurry than fears of a flood in such an exceedingly dry time. At seven in the evening we went to bed in the second story, with our clothes on, as usual, and all three in the same bed, for every available space on the floors, chairs, etc., was in request, and even then there was barely room for the housing of the Indians' guests. An hour later we were awakened by a great turmoil and springing out of bed we picked our way nimbly among the ranks of snoring teamsters on the floor and got to the front windows of the long room. A glance revealed a strange spectacle under the moonlight. The crooked Carson was full to the brim, and its waters were raging and foaming in the wildest way, sweeping around the sharp bends at a furious speed, and bearing on their surface a chaos of logs, brush, and all sorts of rubbish. A depression where its bed had once been in other times was already filling, and in one or two places the water was beginning to wash over the main bank. Men were flying hither and thither, bringing cattle and wagons close up to the house, for the spot of high ground on which it stood extended only some thirty feet in front and about a hundred in the rear. Close to the old river bed just spoken of stood a little log stable, and in this our horses were lodged. While we looked the waters increased so fast in this place that in a few minutes a torrent was roaring by the little stable and its margin encroaching steadily on the logs. We suddenly realized that this flood was not a mere holiday spectacle but meant damage, and not only to the small log stable but to the overland buildings close to the main river, for the waves had now come ashore and were creeping about the foundations and invading the great hay corral adjoining. We ran down and joined the crowd of excited men and frightened animals. We waded knee deep into the log stable, unfastened the horses, and waded out almost waist deep. So fast the water increased. Then the crowd rushed in a body to the hay corral and began to tumble down the huge stacks of baled hay and roll the bales up on high ground by the house. Meantime it was discovered that Owens, an overland driver, was missing, and a man ran to the large stable and, wading in, boot-top-deep, discovered him asleep in his bed, awoke him and waded out again. But Owens was drowsy and resumed his nap. But only for a minute or two, for presently he turned in his bed, his hand dropped over the side, and came in contact with a cold water. It was up level with a mattress. He waded out, breast-deep almost, and the next moment the sunburned bricks melted down like sugar, and a big building crumbled to a ruin, and was washed away in a twinkling. At eleven o'clock only the roof of the little log stable was out of water, and our inn was on an island, in mid-ocean. As far as the eye could reach in the moonlight there was no desert visible, but only a level waste of shining water. The Indians were true prophets, but how did they get their information? I am not able to answer the question. We remained cooped up. Eight days and nights with that curious crew. Swearing, drinking, and card-playing were the order of the day, and occasionally a fight was thrown in for variety. Dirt and vermin. But let us forget those features. Their profusion is simply inconceivable. It is better that they remain so. There were two men. However, this chapter is long enough.