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<h2> CHAPTER XLIV. </h2>
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<p>My salary was increased to forty dollars a week. But I seldom drew it. I
had plenty of other resources, and what were two broad twenty-dollar gold
pieces to a man who had his pockets full of such and a cumbersome
abundance of bright half dollars besides? [Paper money has never come into
use on the Pacific coast.] Reporting was lucrative, and every man in the
town was lavish with his money and his "feet." The city and all the great
mountain side were riddled with mining shafts. There were more mines than
miners. True, not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth hauling to a
mill, but everybody said, "Wait till the shaft gets down where the ledge
comes in solid, and then you will see!" So nobody was discouraged. These
were nearly all "wild cat" mines, and wholly worthless, but nobody
believed it then. The "Ophir," the "Gould & Curry," the "Mexican," and
other great mines on the Comstock lead in Virginia and Gold Hill were
turning out huge piles of rich rock every day, and every man believed that
his little wild cat claim was as good as any on the "main lead" and would
infallibly be worth a thousand dollars a foot when he "got down where it
came in solid." Poor fellow, he was blessedly blind to the fact that he
never would see that day. So the thousand wild cat shafts burrowed deeper
and deeper into the earth day by day, and all men were beside themselves
with hope and happiness. How they labored, prophesied, exulted! Surely
nothing like it was ever seen before since the world began. Every one of
these wild cat mines—not mines, but holes in the ground over
imaginary mines—was incorporated and had handsomely engraved "stock"
and the stock was salable, too. It was bought and sold with a feverish
avidity in the boards every day. You could go up on the mountain side,
scratch around and find a ledge (there was no lack of them), put up a
"notice" with a grandiloquent name in it, start a shaft, get your stock
printed, and with nothing whatever to prove that your mine was worth a
straw, you could put your stock on the market and sell out for hundreds
and even thousands of dollars. To make money, and make it fast, was as
easy as it was to eat your dinner.</p>
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<p>Every man owned "feet" in fifty different wild cat mines and considered
his fortune made. Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!
One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a wild
cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any claim not located on
the mother vein, i.e., the "Comstock") yielded a ton of rock worth
crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting too
much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought of
such a thing. They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy.</p>
<p>New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run
straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty
"feet," and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of
it. They did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said
something. Consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect that
the "indications" were good, or that the ledge was "six feet wide," or
that the rock "resembled the Comstock" (and so it did—but as a
general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you down).
If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of the
country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very
marvel in silver discoveries had transpired. If the mine was a "developed"
one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn't), we praised the
tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in the land;
driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out of
ecstasies—but never said a word about the rock. We would squander
half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed
pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of
admiration of the "gentlemanly and efficient Superintendent" of the mine—but
never utter a whisper about the rock. And those people were always
pleased, always satisfied. Occasionally we patched up and varnished our
reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving
some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones
rattle—and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting
notoriety thus conferred upon it.</p>
<p>There was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not salable. We
received presents of "feet" every day. If we needed a hundred dollars or
so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would
ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot. I had a trunk about half
full of "stock." When a claim made a stir in the market and went up to a
high figure, I searched through my pile to see if I had any of its stock—and
generally found it.</p>
<p>The prices rose and fell constantly; but still a fall disturbed us little,
because a thousand dollars a foot was our figure, and so we were content
to let it fluctuate as much as it pleased till it reached it. My pile of
stock was not all given to me by people who wished their claims "noticed."
At least half of it was given me by persons who had no thought of such a
thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple verbal "thank you;" and
you were not even obliged by law to furnish that. If you are coming up the
street with a couple of baskets of apples in your hands, and you meet a
friend, you naturally invite him to take a few. That describes the
condition of things in Virginia in the "flush times." Every man had his
pockets full of stock, and it was the actual custom of the country to part
with small quantities of it to friends without the asking.</p>
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<p>Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a
man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and
binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly
afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted. Mr. Stewart
(Senator, now, from Nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet
of "Justis" stock if I would walk over to his office. It was worth five or
ten dollars a foot. I asked him to make the offer good for next day, as I
was just going to dinner. He said he would not be in town; so I risked it
and took my dinner instead of the stock. Within the week the price went up
to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty, but nothing could
make that man yield. I suppose he sold that stock of mine and placed the
guilty proceeds in his own pocket. [My revenge will be found in the
accompanying portrait.] I met three friends one afternoon, who said they
had been buying "Overman" stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One
said if I would come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet;
another said he would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same.
But I was going after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward
they sold all their "Overman" at six hundred dollars a foot and generously
came around to tell me about it—and also to urge me to accept of the
next forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me.</p>
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<p>These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still
confine myself strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave us as much
as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a
foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest a
cigar. These were "flush times" indeed! I thought they were going to last
always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.</p>
<p>To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community, I
will remark that "claims" were actually "located" in excavations for
cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins—and
not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very heart of the city; and
forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the market. It was small
matter who the cellar belonged to—the "ledge" belonged to the
finder, and unless the United States government interfered (inasmuch as
the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble metals in
Nevada—or at least did then), it was considered to be his privilege
to work it. Imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among the costly
shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste the ground
with pick and shovel and blasting powder! It has been often done in
California. In the middle of one of the principal business streets of
Virginia, a man "located" a mining claim and began a shaft on it. He gave
me a hundred feet of the stock and I sold it for a fine suit of clothes
because I was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft and sue for
damages. I owned in another claim that was located in the middle of
another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that "East India"
stock (as it was called) sold briskly although there was an ancient tunnel
running directly under the claim and any man could go into it and see that
it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything that remotely resembled one.</p>
<p>One plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to "salt" a wild cat claim and
sell out while the excitement was up. The process was simple.</p>
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<p>The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a wagon
load of rich "Comstock" ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft and
piled the rest by its side, above ground. Then he showed the property to a
simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure. Of course the wagon load of
rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his purchase. A most
remarkable case of "salting" was that of the "North Ophir." It was claimed
that this vein was a "remote extension" of the original "Ophir," a
valuable mine on the "Comstock." For a few days everybody was talking
about the rich developments in the North Ophir. It was said that it
yielded perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps. I went to the place
with the owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet deep, in the bottom
of which was a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish, unpromising rock.
One would as soon expect to find silver in a grindstone. We got out a pan
of the rubbish and washed it in a puddle, and sure enough, among the
sediment we found half a dozen black, bullet- looking pellets of
unimpeachable "native" silver. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing
before; science could not account for such a queer novelty. The stock rose
to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure the world-renowned
tragedian, McKean Buchanan, bought a commanding interest and prepared to
quit the stage once more—he was always doing that. And then it
transpired that the mine had been "salted"—and not in any hackneyed
way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and peculiarly original
and outrageous fashion. On one of the lumps of "native" silver was
discovered the minted legend, "TED STATES OF," and then it was plainly
apparent that the mine had been "salted" with melted half-dollars! The
lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they resembled native silver,
and were then mixed with the shattered rock in the bottom of the shaft. It
is literally true. Of course the price of the stock at once fell to
nothing, and the tragedian was ruined. But for this calamity we might have
lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.</p>
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