CHAPTER XX.

THE MINING COMMUNITY.

            GREATER than the city are the dwellers therein; finer than all incidents and illustrations of the magnitude and material wealth of the Comstock, are lessons of human faith, courage, and ability to conquer every obstacle, that are taught by the story of the mines. For a period of time as long as an average life the famous group has been training men to be miners; has been creating specialized types of character in the midst of a peculiarly courageous and intelligent community.

            Along the Comstock, year after year, the bonds of common interest and sectional pride drew men closer together in spite of strenuous rivalries. Periods of bonanza replaced pioneer cabins with edifices of brick and stone, terraced upon the hillsides. Periods of borrasca welded social ties among those whose fortunes were inseparable from that of the Comstock, even as a trip hammer unites steel blooms into armour-plates for girding iron leviathans of war. Men, women, and children learned to love the keen excitements, the splendid physical activities, the perpetual outpourings of energy, the virile, superb, passionate life of the mining camp.

            Everywhere, almost unheeded, in the bustling, restless community, were the hidden elements of literature, but, strangely enough, no world-famous tale of the Comstock has yet sprung from the fertile soil. Here 

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and there a few Californians have attempted to picture the changing life of early Nevada before it passed away, and brilliant local writers have photographed episodes and single characters. But no great novelist seems to have recognised the preciousness of the fast-passing opportunity. Some day the story-teller will come who can add another masterpiece to literature, as one long dead but not forgotten once went to a crumbling adobe house and a poor, despised race, and there wrote Ramona.

            Said a man who knew and loved the Comstocker: " The person who only judges from the exterior has no business in the camp. He will be picked up a little too often for pleasure if not set down a little too heavily for comfort. A man can have any game he wants, whether played with a pack of cards or with pistols, whether straight from the shoulder, or in kindness from the heart." Dr. Gaily can also be called as witness to the characteristics of the men of these and other mountain camps: " They are not good people in the Sunday-school view, but there is a spirit of charity and a Saxon sense of fair play about them which is a substitute. A deliberate insult to a woman or a child is a bid for instant death, and the general verdict is, ' Served him right! ' But no man here is any other able-bodied person's guardian. Whoever wishes to go to the dogs, goes to the dogs. There is no restraint, or, as they express it, ' There is nobody holding you.' '

            Mining camps, large and small, openly wear their worst side out. Whatever vice exists is open to the sun. With much that is evil, there is also much that is noble, and even heroic. Meanness is very scarce, and shams of any sort are instantly punctured. "What do you know?" is a common morning salutation, and "What can you do?" expresses the habitual attitude of the

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camp toward every stranger. Everywhere among this great and peculiar race of men one finds a graphic, broadly humorous, or quaintly burlesque use of words; never in any part of the world has language been more perfectly fitted to daily needs. Here are grotesque idioms and ancient yet living dialects; here, also, is Shakespeare's English, new-minted by the men of the camp into homely phrases that have become American. The frontiersman is here, but the backwoodsman has been eliminated. One notices with surprise that these men, and in fact all others in the camp, seem endowed with an undismayed spirit of humorous buoyancy, curiously common here to all temperaments, climatic, consonant with the clearness, dryness, and purity of the atmosphere, and yet so individualized as to be full of a rare and inexpressible charm.

            As for the workers in and about the mines, the minutely classified body of men that form the real nucleus of the camp and give it these distinctive features, no other group of men in America are more compactly organized, none show a keener intelligence, and none are deeper-chested, stronger-limbed mountaineers. Their abounding vitality and cool, steady courage (in the mining-camp term, " sand ") have received abundant illustration in the preceding pages, but nothing has been said of their love and tenderness for each other in times of need. Men become "pards," and each one lives for the other, willing to die for him if there is a chance, and that may come at any moment. They take care of the sick with the gentleness and patience of trained hospital nurses. It is a heroic fellow- ship at its best the social order of this masterful, masculine community.

            The underground miner as he goes about the street is a well-dressed, clean person, who takes a

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daily bath and changes his clothing twice a day once when his shift goes on, and once when it comes off. He is calmly proud of his occupation, in the purely professional spirit, but personally he is as modest a man as one could wish to see; it is not at all his fault that he is in his way an aristocrat among working men. His life has made him a sane, thoughtful, responsible person as far as mining goes, no matter how lawless of social conventions he may choose to be in other directions. He knows himself responsible for the lives of his fellow- workmen; his own life hangs upon the honesty of another's work, and that other's life hangs upon the honesty of his own work. A single careless prop, a defective bolt or timber, any neglect or lack of thoroughness, any laziness or ignorance, is sure to bring calamity, and may bring death. Therefore this responsible professional personage is as stern as Rhadamanthus in his judgments upon all that pertains to his business.

            No incompetent foreman can govern such men. In a great fire at Crown Point, Senator John P. Jones, then superintendent, found it necessary to cut a pipe on the seven-hundred-foot level. It was midnight, and almost continuously for five days and nights he had been foremost in leading the dripping firemen and half - naked miners through smoking, flaming, steaming drifts. Jones and a young man went alone into the level to drive a plate of steel through the pipe. They worked for fifteen minutes in an atmosphere so deadly that the lights almost failed them, and the miner could hardly hold the plate. The lights went out as the last stroke fell, and Jones carried his fainting, half-delirious assistant to the main shaft and held him during the ascent. When the hoisting room was reached he dropped his burden on the floor and staggered blindly

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to a bunk. Such were the leaders of the Comstock miners.

            One can hardly understand the curious ebb and flow of mining life in its mingling of admirable reserve with dangerous turbulence without long meditation upon that troglodytic existence often so singularly barren of colour and variety, and yet so inexorable in its demands upon heart, hand, and brain. Men might toil with dull persistency for months in a dark, dripping vault, picking down a wall and wheeling out rock; one twist of the pick might fill the drift with a foaming, resistless river of water. The divine elements of mystery and passion were forever hovering near them. Thus miners become, in the course of years of toil, magnificent examples of the power of such environment to stimulate the emotions and intellects of labourers, and to produce a people with vast capacities for love and hate, for sarcasm and laughter, for terrible wrath and for sublime self-sacrifice.

            From the most ancient times, says Gamboa, the toils of the mine have been a punishment for slaves, a torment for martyrs, a means of revenge for tyrants. The Belgians purposely called the mining shaft " la fosse" the grave, and the Cornish pits were named "coffins." This dreary and exhausting employment makes men long for amusement; they become reckless and yield to the strong and coarse temptations of mining towns. The staples of leisure-hour existence mean to thousands deep drinking and high gaming. The vast fortunes made and lost in mining stocks, and the fluctuations in real values of the mines themselves, insensibly warp the judgment and make the whole community restless, eager, ever anxious for sudden gains. A leading Comstock mine owner once said that he " did not mind what wages he paid his men,"

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for " all the surplus " came back to him in his stock deals.

            The simple, childlike men of the mining camps were quickly stirred for good or evil. During the war the " sanitary flour sack " of Nevada became historic. It began its career in an outside camp where an election bet was made that the loser should carry a fifty- pound sack of flour through the town and donate it to the Sanitary Commission. Gridley, to whom this fate befel, put the sack up at auction, and $4,539 in gold was realized. He then took it and started, in May, 1864, on a tour of the Pacific coast. When the famous sack reached the Comstock, Mark Twain and Tom Fitch made speeches, and the towns on the lode took a holiday. Gridley, covered with flags, the sack of flour on his shoulder, walked through the streets, escorted by brass bands, military companies, carriages, horsemen, and the multitude. Silver City invested $1,800. Gold Hill poured out $6,587, and when Gridley reached Virginia City and mounted the platform with his wondrous sack the miners were determined to " play the game for all it was worth." The Chollar miners, through their spokesman, offered $500; Potosi miners raised them, and so it rose by hundred-dollar leaps, as group after group entered the contest, till the Gould and Curry miners, to use their own phrase, " lifted the rest of the boys out of their boots " by paying $3,500 in cash. Coin rattled like hail on the platform until nearly $14,000 was raised. Men climbed over chairs and emptied their pockets before Gridley. According to the Territorial Enterprise, a " small brown bug " crawling on a man's arm was caught, put up at auction, and sold for ten dollars for the Sanitary Fund, as a sort of side-show, while Gridley was still auctioning off his flour. A person who jeered irreverently

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at the bug, and also suggested that the money " had better be given straight, " was immediately thrashed by an irate miner.

            Nothing in the long story of the Comstock surpassed the outburst of delight that took place upon the surrender of Lee. The people "went wild in a frenzy of emotion." Said one of the newspapers: " No such drinking was ever before seen anywhere. In three hours the majority of the men of the city were crazy drunk, including many who were never before under the influence of liquor, and were to be seen lying in heaps. Business was entirely suspended, and the printers, editors, and reporters being all drunk, no papers were issued." Mark Twain himself could not invent a more unique, plausible, and all-sufficient editorial excuse for not coming out on time. Rabelais in all his madcap revels never depicted such " high old times" as Virginia City saw that day. Men left the saloons and walked the streets, drinking the healths of the war heroes and of the war President until the last reveller sank into maudlin sleep. A few days later came the news of the assassination of Lincoln. Then the men of the Comstock wept like children and draped their houses and stores in black. Seizing a man who muttered approval of the deed, they gave him thirty lashes on the bare back, and were with great difficulty restrained from hanging him.

            Newspapers were very numerous in the Nevada mining camps. Scores of brilliant and audacious writers entered the new fields with able publications whose scattered files will always remain the best contemporary record, and often the only one, of many a forgotten district long since abandoned to primeval silence. The support that these journals received was surprisingly liberal, and while the camps were pros-

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perous they were bonanzas to their fortunate owners. Before the Big Bonanza was exhausted more than a hundred different newspapers had been started in the scattered towns of Nevada, whose population was only sixty thousand people. " Along the shore where these dismantled journals were driven by adverse winds," writes one of the pioneer editors, " are buried many absurd, strange, wonderful, and often tragic experiences." A few, a very few, of the old-time editors survive, in a world as remote from their thoughts and training as the thickly settled, railroad-gridironed Sacramento Valley is remote from one of the white-haired trappers of Siskiyou. Some of them, winning a wider fame, left the Comstock, or Reese River, or White Pine, decades ago; others, tired of the " festive pistol's popping" and "a man for breakfast every morning," have learned to plant orchards and vine- yards in the California valleys, and so lengthened their days after the long service of pioneer journalism.

            Hard and ceaseless that service was. Into every new camp some wandering editor-printer went with his press, types, and outfit, was noisily welcomed by the miners, turned his mule loose on the hillside, and began to pencil his announcement for the first issue of the Prospect, Miner, Argent, Silver State, True Fissure, Reveille, Messenger, or whatever he chose to call the new venture. The Silver Bend Reporter, started in such a manner, in 1867, at a frontier mining village in a rocky caņon of Nye County, announced its advent in language that was there considered a model of the dignified style of salutatory: " Here, in this bright offshoot of civilization, surrounded by a vast ocean of wilderness, shall be a newspaper! In young, vigorous, and beautiful Belmont we have settled." The Territorial Enterprise, the pioneer newspaper of the region,

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had five men on the editorial staff and twenty-two compositors. Five hundred dollars a month was the salary of the managing editor. Mark Twain and Dan De Quille were reporters. About this time Tom Fitch, of the Union, challenged Joe Goodman, of the Enterprise, to a duel in Six-Milecaņon. Mark Twain recorded his disappointment in the next issue: " Young Wilson and ourselves at once mounted a couple of fast horses and followed in their wake at the rate of a mile a minute, since when, being neither iron-clad nor half- soled, we enjoy more real comfort in standing up than in sitting down. But we lost our bloody item, for Marshall Perry arrived early with a detachment of constables, and Deputy-Sheriff Blodgett came with a lot of blarsted sub-sheriffs, and these miserable, meddling whelps arrested the whole party and marched them back to town, "

            Columns of this sort of thing could be culled from the pioneer newspapers of the Comstock in the days of their glory, when their laughing and fighting writers were the most virile, rollicking, merciless, tender-hearted quill-drivers in America. K. M. Daggett, Henry Mighels, of Carson, Myron Angel, J. T. Goodman, and D. E. McCarthy were among the most famous Nevada editors of the period, and nearly all of them belong to the Comstock group of newspapers, where they first exhibited their high literary abilities. A little later, while these veterans were still in harness and a younger group of writers such as Sam Davis and Arthur McEwen were becoming known, the press of Nevada contained more real Pacific-coast literature and gave its writers more freedom of expression than did the newspapers of California and Oregon put together.

            A pioneer newspaper office early in the '60's is de-

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scribed as a rickety one-story frame building about twenty feet wide. It contained an old-style Washington press, cases, desks, and editor's table. A small lean-to addition was the kitchen and dining room, and sleeping-bunks like those in a ship's forecastle occupied one side. On cold winter nights the stove was made red-hot, and the printers moved as close to it as possible and " lashed old sacks around their feet with bale rope " to keep themselves warm. When it rained the roof leaked, and the dripping water was led over the cases by strings, so many of which filled the upper part of the roof that it looked as if hung with " webs of Brobdingnagian spiders, " Every one, down to the printer's devil, had shares in some favourite mine, and boxes full of specimens lay around in the corners. When a prospector from the desert entered the office, editors and printers dropped their work and gathered around him to listen and ask questions. Many of these pioneer newspaper men had done more or less prospecting them- selves.

            Stories about Mark Twain, whose brother was Territorial Secretary, are countless in Nevada. He came to Virginia City from another camp, where he had been writing letters signed "Josh." When the first steam press in Nevada started in the Enterprise office, the " general mix-up of new press, newspaper, and bottles of wine " caused Twain to take among other things what he averred was " a severe cold on his mind." He staid at home and one of his chums took his place at the local desk. The next morning the paper contained an article purporting to come from Mark Twain, in which he was made to make an abject and circumstantial apology to a large number of Virginia City newspaper men and other citizens whom he had at various times criticised. This document instantly cured

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the "cold on the mind, " and Twain, resuming his editorial chair, described its late incumbent as " a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive Jackass rabbit of the Sierras! "

            But it was as legislative reporter that Clemens became a shining light of the times. Besides his sober, everyday Senate and Assembly items, he concocted a Third House report which pelted the Legislature with incessant sarcasm. Member after member was made to air his views in a grandiose burlesque of his favourite expressions. After an excellent parody upon Senator Stewart's famous speech against taxing the mines, the president of this mythical Third House responded:

            " Take your seat, Bill Stewart! I am not going to sit here and listen to that same old song over and over again. I have been reporting and reporting that infernal speech for the last thirty days, and I want you to understand that you can't play it off any longer. When I want it I will repeat it myself I know it by heart, anyhow. You and your bed-rock tunnels and your blighted miners' blasted hopes have got to be a sort of nightmare to me, and I won't put up with it any longer."

            Thus the humorist dealt undismayed with each individual idiosyncrasy of the legislators, and made them ridiculous throughout the length and breadth of Nevada. When poor Larrowe, of Reese River, returned to his constituency he was everywhere greeted with admiring quotations from the Proceedings of the Third House, such as "Nine sceptred and anointed quartz mills, sir, in Lander County already! " and the terse presidential comment: "Plant yourself, sir! plant yourself! I don't want any more yowling."

            Leaving the newspapers, let us again turn to the

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mining class. The statistics for 1880 are typical of the working force at a time when it was larger and better organized than at present. At that time there were 2,770 miners employed, of which 770 were Americans, 816 were Irish, 640 were English, 191 were Canadians, 83 were Scotch, and the rest were " from everywhere." Welsh, Swiss, Swedes, Slavonians, Danes, Belgians, French, Australians, Manxmen, Norwegians, Portuguese, and Russians were represented. There was one Finlander and one Laplander. Six more men were married than, unmarried. The average age was a fraction over thirty-six; the average height was five feet nine and one fifth inches; the average weight was very close to one hundred and sixty-six pounds. Classified, lastly, according to employment, in thirty-nine distinct occupations in and around the mines, the Americans furnished a majority of the foremen, bosses, engineers, firemen, carpenters, blacksmiths, and machinists. Both the Irish and the English furnished more miners in the technical sense than the Americans did. About eight hundred men in all were needed in the small but important occupations, such as masons, melters, pump men, brakemen, lamp men, and a dozen others; nearly two thousand were miners in the full meaning of the term.

            The organizations by which the Comstock miners have maintained wages, have ruled in this respect under all administrations, and still continue to rule, are simply " Unions." At Virginia City, Gold Hill, and Silver City their word long ago became law. On one occasion a superintendent who had attempted to cut wages was concealed in the home of a priest, or he would have been torn limb from limb by the indignant miners. No Chinaman was allowed in the mines under any pretext. As time passed these remarkable Unions,

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which had dictated to Stewart and his allies in the days of the earlier bonanzas, reached out to greater victories. When Sharon and the Bank of California syndicate began to build a railroad to Virginia City it was decided to use Chinese labour in grading.

            Sharon controlled nearly everything, from the newspapers to the Legislature; but no sooner were his Chinese graders established in a camp near the Overman mine than a committee of three hundred and fifty-nine miners from the Union went out, four abreast, like a military company, in two battalions, and descended on the Chinese. The sheriff of the county ordered them to disperse and return home. One man replied that they would do so as soon as they were through, and advised the official to sit down and watch proceedings. He halted them and read the Riot Act, to which they listened with grave attention until he had finished that impressive document. Then they roared sealike applause, gave three cheers for the "United States of America, " and marched on with loud Homeric laughter. As they went along the course of the railroad construction the Chinese deserted pick and shovel and fled into the gulches. Not a shot was fired. The " Committee " returned to report progress, and for eight days not a Chinaman dared to do a stroke of work, while the lordly Sharon was supplicating the Unions to permit the resumption of railroad grading. Finally he signed an agreement by which he removed the Chinese from the districts of Virginia City and Gold Hill.

            The wage standard that the Unions insisted upon was not less than four dollars a day for eight hours labour. All workers in the mines, skilled and unskilled, were put on the same arbitrary level. Their one reply to every argument that if cheaper labourers were employed in handling low-grade ores, more men

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could be given employment at the higher rates, has been the curt statement, " Pay four dollars a day or shut down the mines, "

            Four dollars a day was not unusual in the mines of the Pacific coast at the time of the discovery of the Comstock. When the cost of obtaining supplies is taken into consideration, four dollars left the labourer less surplus than two dollars in field work in the accessible valleys of California. As the Comstock lode was developed, only the best miners were employed, and others went to newer districts, thus keeping down the supply. The bonanzas were discovered at such intervals as to give the best mines a large margin of profit, even when paying such wages, and the stockholders, always anxious for immediate returns, were never willing to shut down the mines long enough to secure a new body of working men, even if they could thus break up the Unions and greatly reduce the running expenses of the mines. Indeed, there never was any united effort to reduce wages, so violent and immediate was the revolt against the slightest move in that direction, so strongly were the Unions supported by the whole community. Besides, in many if not all cases the temporary closing of a mine meant the flooding of it with water, and perhaps years of costly efforts to pump it dry again. The Unions held an impregnable fortress.

            If there had been no stock market, and if careful business men had been owners of the mines and had held their shares as an investment first, last, and always, no miners' Union or mining community could have prevented readjustment of the amount and the distribution of the wage fund. The Comstock plan, which paid the poorest and the best miners by the same scale of compensation, would have given place to a sliding scale fixed by the employers according to their

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ideas of the labour market. The artificial standards of the Union were only made possible by the unique financial history of the great lode; by the millions of dollars in unproductive assessments collected from eager men and women of every rank in life throughout the Pacific-coast States and Territories; by the splendid succession of bonanzas which created in turn the fictitious paper bonanzas of the stock markets; and, lastly, by the great money kings, Stewart, Jones, Sharon, Ralston, Hayward, and the Bonanza Four.

            Every observer of the Comstock in its palmy days noted the universally high standards of living. Not only the necessaries, but the luxuries of life formed the daily fare of the miners. .California and the adjacent valleys sent the choicest fruits, berries, vegetables, milk, fresh butter, and stall-fed beef. Trout, venison, bear, squirrels, quail, and grouse from the Sierras, salmon from the Sacramento, ducks, geese, snipe, and other wild fowl from the sloughs and bays, and oysters from the Chesapeake, were everyday affairs in the Virginia City markets. In 1876 the railroad carried to the two towns in round numbers 400,000 pounds of fish, 350,000 pounds of poultry, 120,000 pounds of oysters, 1,020,000 pounds of eggs, 1,000,000 pounds of vegetables, and over 2,700,000 pounds of fresh fruit. Hams of the best grade to be obtained were a favourite article of food, and nearly 600,000 pounds were used. It is hardly necessary to continue the list. No labourers ever lived on better fare.

            The clothing worn by the miners at home and in the streets was substantial and often elegant. Their underwear, white shirts, and shoes were of the grade preferred by the average storekeeper or landowner. The unmarried miners lived in large, well-kept lodging houses, the rooms of which were carpeted, heated,

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and comfortable. Bathrooms were universal, not only in the lodging houses but at the hoisting buildings. Board and lodging which cost forty or forty-five dollars per month in bonanza times has been reduced by 1880 to thirty dollars, and even less.

            Pay day on the Comstock comes weekly in some classes of work, and the habit of squaring accounts on Monday has grown up among merchants, so that Monday is still called " steamer day," a phrase borrowed from pioneer San Francisco. The regular pay day of the working miners is usually from the first to the third of every month. The men, as they come up out of the mine, go to the timekeeper's office and get their accounts. Then they go to another office, where the cashier or head clerk pays them. In the best Comstock times Consolidated Virginia's monthly pay roll was ninety thousand dollars, and three quarters of a million dollars was paid along the Comstock every month to the employees of the mines. Four dollars a day for workmen counts up fast, and, besides, the engineers, machinists, and a few others received five, six, and even seven dollars a day. The railroad men, the mill men along the Carson River, and the lumberers in the mountains all receive their wages in much the same way as the miners do, and the cities on the lode receive the most of it back again. In many cases every man in a mine leaves a dollar or two with the cashier, when he draws his pay, for the family of some dead comrade; in this way as much as two thousand dollars is some- times raised in five or six months. This is the miners' life-insurance system.

            Chosen as the miners are the very pick of the mining population of the Pacific slope they are young and vigorous, but, as vital statistics show, they suffer from pulmonary troubles. This is due to the sudden

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change from the tropic lower levels of the mine to the snow-covered, windy ridge of the town in winter. " Many a man," says Mr. Lord, " reached his house half-choked with pneumonia, and spitting blood." The introduction of warm dressing- and waiting-rooms at the hoisting works lessened disease, though the vitality of the miners continued to be sapped by their excessive use of stimulants. Long after the big bonanza days the average annual consumption of beer on the Comstock was fifteen gallons apiece for every resident of the county, and that of spirituous liquors was five gallons. The twenty thousand people spent annually about nine hundred thousand dollars for beer, wine, and ardent drinks. This was called by the saloon men " a dry season," however, for they had seen the average annual consumption of all classes of liquors nearly three times as much.

            The remarkable efficiency of the well-fed, well- clothed, and contented miners of the Comstock has been noted in previous chapters. There are no better miners known to the craft, nor can any nationality be said to excel. Working groups are usually made up of men of several nations, for they accomplish more in this manner. In 1877, in the California mine, 217,432 tons of ore were extracted and milled. This, it has been estimated, was a daily average of 1.13 ton for each man employed. The report of the company gave the expenses of that year as follows: Hoisting ore, $186,461; supplies, $357,101; salaries and wages, $788,012 giving a total of $1,331,574. The 217,432 tons of ore brought up was lifted 1,600 feet and cost at the surface $6.12 per ton. Mining authorities say that this entire record is without parallel for cheapness and efficiency under the given conditions.

            Never were the self-reliance and sheer fighting

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capacity of the men of the Comstock better shown than during and just after the great fire of October, 1875. It began at six o'clock in the morning in a low lodging house kept by a woman called " Crazy Kate." Scores of cheap frame buildings surrounded it, every- thing was like tinder, and a fierce gale was blowing. People roused from sleep had barely time to escape with their lives. The hoisting works lifted men out of the depths as fast as possible, and miners and fire- men fought the flames. Vain task! The wind hurled fiery missiles across the city, kindling fresh centres of destruction, while the main torrent rolled on like a lava river from Kilauea, hemming in the defeated toilers. Great brick buildings tumbled, as in the Boston and Chicago fires. The populace, yielding to despair, fled to the mountains and there looked down from barren rocks upon the destruction of Virginia City. Out of the ocean of fire came the roar of explosives as whole masses of buildings were blown to pieces by gunpowder and dynamite stored within, or were blasted out of the way by the heroic men, still fighting as they retreated. Pillars of flame and the mass of dark smoke were seen fifteen miles away. The business houses, public buildings, hotels, banks, churches, freight and passenger depots, and many private residences were in flames when the whole fighting force was centred on the costly mine works. The mountains shook with blasts of dynamite, clearing open spaces about mills and hoisting works, but the fire leaped over in a hundred places at once, caught lumber yards and shaft houses, and swept nearly all the surface works of the mines out of existence in a few moments. Millions of feet of lumber, thousands of cords of wood, trestles, offices, roofs, machinery, inflammable supplies of every description, threw out such

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heat that a pile of railroad car-wheels in the open air in the Ophir yards were smelted together. The fire began to creep down the great shafts, and here the miners and firemen struggled in the midst of blazing ruins until the mines themselves and the joint shaft buildings of California and Consolidated Virginia were saved.

            About two thousand buildings were destroyed on the lode, and ten million dollars would hardly have replaced the loss. Car loads of cooked provisions, blankets, and other supplies were started toward the Comstock while the fire was still burning. Money was telegraphed. Relief committees were organized in other towns and cities. Lumber was placed on the smoking earth, still being wet by firemen. Electric lights enabled the work of rebuilding to go on by night as well as by day. In sixty days the people of Virginia City were again settled comfortably. An extract from the official report made by the superintendent of Ophir will serve to show the stuff that men were made of in old Comstock days: " On the day after the fire men were sent to Carson and Dutch Flat, California, to procure and ship timbers; machinery was telegraphed for. The new double-reel hoisting engine just completed for the combination shaft of the Chollar-Potosi, Hale and Norcross, and Savage was secured; the old engine foundations were torn out and new ones constructed; work was prosecuted without cessation; supplies hauled a considerable distance on account of the destruction of the railroad tunnel and bridges; the works rebuilt and hoisting through the shaft resumed November 25th, being inside of thirty days from the time of destruction." The new buildings cost nearly $318,000. Consolidated Virginia and California, which had lost $1,461,000 by the fire,

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replaced everything that was destroyed within fifty days, and yet declared without delay their regular dividends. Consolidated Virginia paid out over two million dollars while rebuilding its works, for it was in bonanza. These were extraordinary and indeed unprecedented feats of labour and capital. The city of mines had come out gloriously under the fire test.

            Such were the workmen, such the communities, that once clustered in the rocky waste on the mountains of Nevada. They are still the same, though since the Big Bonanza was worked out the mines have paid their owners poorly, and the towns have suffered much more than in any former period of borrasca. Small stockholders no longer carry the burden of assessments as formerly, but a few large owners have been forced to prop up the fallen market and sustain by their own wealth the daring and still alluring speculation. None except themselves can say how many more millions of dollars these men will or can spend in the search. What new problems are to be solved in deeps below deeps, what magnificent metalliferous deposits may rest undiscovered in the great fissure, no human prophecy can foretell.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE COMSTOCK AS IT IS.

            THUS far, the story has been a straightforward narrative of events, from the days of the trappers to the exhaustion of the Big Bonanza. Those Titans whose plots and counterplots shook half a continent are dead, or have forever left the Comstock. We have fallen upon dark and narrow times, and yet, like a ship long beating up some iron coast against unfriendly winds, each headland we round may prove to be the last cape that shuts us out from another prosperous voyage. The spirit of the true mining men was never so clearly present as it has been through the lesser episodes of these sixteen weary years of the Silence of the Comstock.

            " She has another word to say. She is asleep, but not dead, " Thus spoke incarnate poetry to me from the lips of one of the ancients as I stood on a gray waste pile, looking out over the barren land. The story ends with a question "What next?" Is it to become a land without a habitation, a mountain of ruins like the ancient city forts of those unrecorded miners of Mashonaland and the Golden Chersonese?

            If thus it was now ended, how very far from a new story it is when all is told. Nothing among the deeds of gold-hungry men and wandering races of conquerors could be less strange than this, and yet it covers so large a space as to become almost an epic. Over and

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over again, great busy camps, becoming strangely silent, have perished as frosted leaves. The cities the miner has built who shall name or number them? They are hidden in trackless deserts, luring generations of prospectors to their deaths; they lie among Andes and Himalayas, under glaciers, in tangled Cambodian forests, or, deeper still, where lost continents are sunk in ocean's dreamless ooze. Not yet has that hour of doom and oblivion arrived for the proud Comstock, but the sceptre has already passed to younger camps.

            Visit with me the Comstock, then, in this year of grace 1896 and let us briefly note the condition of affairs. "We climb with the railroad from well-watered Carson's sea-green circle, through wild gorges and along the crest of ridges that look down upon thousands of prospect holes. Every moment the view broadens and brightens. We climb through a barren, lonely, forsaken land of strange, shining grays and browns, clear cut in a marvellously invigorating mountain atmosphere. The desert slopes endlessly away from the eternal mountains, and a soft, golden glow, like that which pervades one of Gerome's Egyptian paintings lingers in the far east, across the yellow sands, the silver sage brush. High peaks, treeless even to their deepest caņons, cold, severe, and yet so wonderfully chiselled and rounded that the heart leaps to be- hold them, are ranged about the amphitheatre wherein the cities of the Comstock were founded thirty-seven years ago. All is revealed in successive landscapes, as the railroad carries one upward from the valley floor of the Carson itself a high plateau toward these cities in the clouds, still strong and patient, still able to endure until the end.

            A little space farther and higher, and the train

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swings along the side of that old-time Slippery Gulch, down which the pioneers slid on rainy mornings, as they climbed painfully, with more or less reprehensible language, to their new-found placers on Gold Hill. There, in the hollow and caņon-crossed head of the gulch, and on its precipitous sides, so steep that as one explores the outlying streets his hand almost touches the rise of the hill, the city of Gold Hill abides, and all the world-famous South End mines of the Comstock honeycomb the vein beneath it.

            Although Gold Hill played a minor part in the great trilogy of the Comstock, it shows, even more than Virginia City, that most striking feature of the true Western mining camp, the adoption of the natural surface of the earth, no matter how steep, rocky, or difficult of access, as good enough to build upon. A little levelling may have been necessary to keep streets and buildings from rolling to the bottom of the gulches, but as soon as the stern requirements of the law of gravity were to some extent satisfied the pioneers ceased the struggle. Every inch of ground that a house can be made to cling to is occupied, and the roof of one line of dwellings is often on a level with the basements of the next higher row. So strenuously have men seized upon and utilized every point of vantage that the houses seem piled on top of one another in the centre of the town, while outside scattered dwellings climb the ridges like human beings, leaning forward against the slope and resting in groups. One sees in such an old mining camp so much that seems to subvert the ordinary laws of architectural stability, so many leaning towers and walls, that he is fain to believe that the whole mass of the town is in reality bolted and iron-plated together and fastened to the mountain slopes. In the deep horseshoe-shaped

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quarry pit a mile across that by some curious misnomer was called Gold Hill, neighbour can talk to neighbour almost as in a theatre, so wonderfully do whole streets and blocks of buildings overhang those beneath them.

            This Gold Hill, this irregular and immense mass of overcrowded structures, some of rough-hewn black timbers, some costly and pretentious, but all mingling with and actually jostling the shanties; these sheds, barns, and rude cheap cottages; these bits of fence and sidewalk; these crumbling steps leading from street to street and from house to house, fitter for goats than for human beings; these black chimneys, piles of rusting machinery, high-roofed mills, and acres of white and brown dump heaps encroaching on the town or sloping away into gulches all give one a vivid impression of what life was in the days when the place was crowded to the brim. In those days it was not a city in fact, nor yet a town; it was simply one great communal dwelling or primitive apartment house. It still has a communal aspect, for the lessening population retires year by year from the outskirts, leaving shanty after shanty to rot there, and occupies the better buildings.

            The railroad carries us through the Divide a few hundred yards, and the last and greatest panorama of the Comstock chain instantly sweeps into view. Sugar Loaf and the Flowery Range are fully revealed, the North End mines and the historic metropolis of the silver miners lie spread out on an irregular sloping mound broken by ravines and hollows, rising to the mountains of granite on the west, and sinking into vast caņons east. It is larger than Gold Hill, and slowly becomes more impressive, though not so immediately picturesque. It lies marvellously open to all the

THE COMSTOCK AS IT IS. 263

winds that blow, and they seem to gather here from the western half of the continent. The city is a forest of chimney pots of all shapes and sizes and every conceivable manner of patent, aimed at circumventing winds of every sort, even perpendicular ones. Here ends, almost in the heart of the town, this mountain railroad flung out into a wilderness of rocks for the sake of the silver mines, just as in California a broad, superb stage road is flung twenty-six miles out into the Coast Range to carry passengers to the Lick Observatory, on the top of Mount Hamilton.

            What is the visitor's first impression, supposing that he knows the past of the Comstock? Not disappointment, but a poignant regret, almost strong enough to be called a personal sorrow. Wreck, decay, abandonment, make the dominant note of the scene. Many of the great mills stand idle over their vast gray waste heaps, rotting slowly down to death and chaos. In- side, the stamps hang rusting in long rows, "hung up," as the miners say. No clang and clatter is heard no strong, deep roar of the massive machinery that filled the caņons and the crowded streets in bonanza times with constant undercurrents of thrilling, pulsing sound night and day alike while millions of dollars' worth of bullion poured out of the smelters.

            The catastrophe for it is nothing less does not seem to attract any one's serious attention, hardly becomes formulated into a casual phrase. One is told elsewhere that " times are dull on the Comstock," that Virginia City " is not what it used to be." One hears on the Comstock itself that " after a little things will pick up " ; that there is plenty of good rock down in the mines; that the trouble is with " the ring " the speculators who are trying to control something or

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other; that pretty soon the lower levels will be pumped out, and work resumed in that most torrid mining belt known to modern science; that matters are nearly ready for a great simultaneous revival of enthusiasm. Nor is this merely the despairing cry of unacknowledged defeat; it is something almost too sacred to be put into words. It is neither more nor less, in its higher manifestations, than the sublime spirit of patriotism, defending to the last the lonely mountain fortress of the miner State of the Comstock. These men and women who built Gold Hill and Virginia are unconsciously loyal to something that never took visible form in the chain of American institutional development. The township, county, and political state have not become as living realities to them as the laws, customs, and social order of the Comstock. The cheerfulness and even buoyancy, therefore, with which the community as a whole maintains itself is something that passes human understanding.

            I stood and watched a man at the ore heap in a mill. He was a very strong, tall man, blond-bearded, with flakes of gray in his hair; a kindly, sweet-tempered mountaineer, and he knew the mill and mines as a child knows the rooms of the house in which he lives. " Our mine is doing a little better, " he said with a smile of pleasure. " They think up at Ophir that they'll strike it rich before any one else, but maybe they're mistaken about that."

            Everywhere the same esprit du corps exists; it goes far to explain the victories of the Comstock. Everywhere, in spite of the real decay and wasting plant of many enterprises, things are kept in some degree pre- pared for the expected revival of mining interests. In outward appearances, the community has fallen upon hopelessly hard times; but the potential capacity of

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mines and mills is still enormous, and if large bodies of pay ore were uncovered the really important properties would almost instantly resume work at full speed. After twenty years of borrasca, an air of constant readiness still pervades every department. The boys that sharpen drills, the bosses and surveyors and superintendents, all dwell in this hopeful atmosphere and knit themselves closer and closer to the thoughts of the unknown mine depths.

            Even while this chapter was being written these unconquerable Comstockers made a discovery that may prove a new bonanza. In previous chapters the formation of the chain of mines has been described. In the chapter on Sutro Tunnel it was explained that many ledges were cut by that great adit, and that some of these ledges might prove valuable. As it happens, there is a wide ledge of rock, rich in a few places on the surface, that lies east of and parallel to the Comstock, the centre ridges of both lodes being perhaps a mile apart, and the lodes possibly uniting somewhere in the depths. The long-neglected ledge, the Brunswick, will now be thoroughly explored from end to end a work of many months. Ore now taken out of a three-foot vein in the extension of Chollar and in Hale and Norcross territory is very rich, and much resembles Comstock ore. Being drained at a depth of 1,600 feet by the Sutro Tunnel, water can be handled cheaply should bonanzas exist in the Brunswick, and it is possible that in a few years a fourth line of deep-mine works will be built far east, beyond the long-neglected third line of shafts.

            The future is a "sealed seed plot," and no one knows what has been sown therein for these great- hearted Comstock miners. But how dramatic a possibility it is, that while all the world is being stirred by

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the extraordinary mining events of recent months, not only in America, but in nearly every other country under the sun, the ancient strength of the Comstock is perhaps about to return!

CHAPTER XXII.

THE AMERICAN MINER OF TO-DAY.

            THE American miner of to-day is toiling steadily on, in his countless camps, making history more rapidly than ever before. The yield of our mines fluctuates to some extent, but every decade shows enormous gains. According to official statistics, the total value of the mineral products of the United States in the two years 1893 and 1894, the last period for which we have authoritative data, was, in round numbers, $1,169,000,000. This includes the metals, iron leading in value, with silver, gold, copper, lead, and zinc following in the order named; it also includes fuels, structural materials, abrasive materials, minerals used for chemical purposes, mineral pigments, and many miscellaneous products of our mines.

            The vast growth of all departments of American mining industry can be plainly illustrated by a few statistics. In 1845 the entire United States produced but 100 tons of copper; in 1890 a single mine, the Calumet and Hecla of Michigan, produced 26,727 tons; in 1894 the total product of the United States was 158,120 tons. The world-famous Calumet and Hecla has produced over 500,000 tons of copper since its discovery and has paid nearly $45,000,000 in dividends. In 1825 the lead product of the United States was but 1,500 tons; the notable Illinois and Missouri deposits brought this up to 30,000 tons in 1845, but the annual yield sank to 20,000 tons, and far below,

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until Eureka, Leadville, Coeur d'Alene, and other great groups of mines carried it to the maximum of 1893 some 230,000 tons. Similar illustrations might be given in every other department of mining. As far as civilization is concerned, the iron industry is the most suggestive of all. According to Mr. Birkenbine's monograph on Production of Iron Ores (United States Reports), the approximate total iron product of the world is 57,000,000 tons, of which the United States, ranking by far the first, produces 16,300,000 tons.

            Such impressive sum totals may serve to illustrate the greatness of these rapidly developing underground industries. Better, however, are glimpses of a few of the newer American mine groups which are making fortunes for men, especially from the precious metals. The Cripple Creek district is situated upon some rounded hills from seven to twelve miles southwest of Pike's Peak, Colorado, at an elevation of from 9,000 to 10,800 feet. Some early prospectors organized Mount Pisgah district here in 1874, but failed to handle the ores at a profit. An excitement occurred in 1884, when 5,000 people camped here on " salted " claims. Some of these claims afterward proved to be valuable, though sold on false pretenses. Along in 1890 numbers of tenderfeet, or " alfalfa miners," as the prospectors called them, began to take up claims in the twice-abandoned camps. After a while, by a little stream in the aspen thickets, a lame burro, a dog with a broken leg, and a man with a broken arm are said to have given the chief camp its name. Notable discoveries were soon made, changing penniless men into millionaires, and by 1894 the Cripple Creek excitement was something wonderful to see.

            Cripple Creek mining towns have continued to

THE AMERICAN MINER OF TO-DAY. 269

grow since then; ten or twelve camps, with, a total population of some 25,000, lie within an area of sixteen square miles. Something like a hundred mines are shipping ore to the cyanide-process mills at Florence, on the Arkansas. The mines in 1892 yielded $600,000; in 1893, $2,100,000; in 1894, $3,000,000; and in 1895, nearly $8,000,000. This one district has made Colorado the leading gold-producing State in the Union, the total output of gold in 1895 being $17,- 340,495.

            Another district attracting attention is the Mercur of Utah, in the Oquirrh Mountains, where a Government mule, kicking a piece of rock, revealed the gleam of gold to a lucky teamster named Allen. Here, and in the adjacent Tintic range, are rapidly growing camps, producing half the precious metals of Utah.

            But perhaps no portion of the great mineral belts of America is being more rapidly developed at present than California, long to some extent neglected, and yet possessing many very famous mines and enormous undeveloped resources. The noted Idaho and Eureka ore body yielded over $11,000,000 in seventeen years, and paid over $5,000,000 in dividends. The Hayward, the Keystone, and the Oneida of Amador; the Massachusetts and the Gold Hill of Nevada; the Sierra Buttes; the Plumas Eureka and the Standard Consolidated, are equally familiar names to California gold miners. About eighteen thousand miners are regularly employed in twenty-four hundred well-established mines, in different parts of the State. The Pacific coast north of Mexico, and including Nevada and Arizona, has fully a thousand stamp mills, carrying about fifteen thousand stamps and costing, with other machinery, fully $20,000,000. Half of this investment is in the State of California.

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            The American prospector, cheerful and energetic as ever, is at work in hundreds and thousands of once- abandoned camps, whose ledges could not be profitably worked by old methods. He is busy revealing new treasures in the islands of Unga and Unalaska, in camps along the Yukon, in the south-coast Alaskan gold fields, and in British Columbian districts, such as Cassiar, Caribou, and Rossland. Prospectors are searching mile by mile the mountains of Washington, Oregon, and California, all the way down to the Mexican line. The entire length of the great Rocky Mountain mineral belt is being prospected more vigorously than ever before. Only the other day, out in the Mojave desert, a large district was found, where placer gold and rich quartz veins abound and new camps are there being established. One of these is called the Randsburg. As usual, stories of the rediscovery of the long-lost " Gunsight " and " Pegleg " mines come from various parts of the desert. Every issue of the mining journals contains hundreds of items from new camps, illustrating the toils and triumphs of the prospector as he tests surface gravel claims, or tunnels for ancient river channels under lava beds, as in Idaho, or finds in all sorts of unheard-of places the gleam of minerals, useful or precious.

            Much has been said in this book about the prospector, and more might justly be added, for he still re- mains the pioneer, differing in essential details from the miner, the speculator, and the capitalist. He lives a free, careless, outdoor life, and he has blazed the trail for others all the way from Missouri and Texas to Alaska and California. Though better fitted for his work than he was fifty years ago, and better supported by those who make fortunes from his discoveries, the American prospector of to-day has not essentially

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changed; he is still a wide traveller, an heroic adventurer, a man of infinite resource and homely, well-tried virtues. Sometimes, like Dick Gird, he reaches a district " with a pair of blankets and six dollars in money," and finds a million-dollar mine; sometimes, like Major Reading, he " loads a train of mules " with gold nuggets from new placers, but far more often than otherwise the wilderness, which takes him to its heart, sweetens his many hardships with such devotion to his chosen work that all his life he searches for hidden treasure, and rarely makes more than his grub stake.

            The whole American mining field broadens year by year, not only on the frontier, but in many of the staid and long-settled communities. Perhaps, with improved methods, even the gold deposits of the Appalachians, from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas and Georgia, can be profitably worked on a large scale. The best authorities declare that the cost of roasting and chlorinating ores in a hundred-ton plant is now less than three dollars per ton. By the cyanide process it is even less, in ores adapted to this useful method. A few years ago these processes cost ten dollars and even twenty dollars per ton, but large bodies of low-grade ores, long necessarily neglected, can now be handled with profit.

            So promising are recent developments that it would not surprise mining authorities if the annual gold yield of the United States, British Columbia, and Alaska reached the hundred-million-dollar mark by the close of the century; nor does it seem unlikely that the total yield of different countries will add to the world's gold stock within the next ten years more than $2,500,000,000. A period of higher property values and of larger business prosperity is clearly indicated by this astonishing revival of mining interests. Evidently the story of the miner and his mines will go on for ages to come.

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            I may say, in closing, that there has never been a time when so many attractive and important books upon mining were being published by specialists. Be-sides the United States Government Annual and Census Reports and the invaluable volumes of the leading mining and engineering periodicals of America and Europe, I note among recent publications Rothwell's Mineral Industry, Statistical, etc., a masterpiece of work; Eissler's Metallurgy of Gold, largely devoted to new processes; Hatch and Chalmers's Gold Mines of the Rand; and Kemp's Ore Deposits of the United States. Really monumental works upon the history, mechanics, and metallurgy of mining are each year appearing in greater numbers. The noble industry of which I have given only a glimpse is in the hands of highly trained specialists, and everywhere, from the arctic circle to the auriferous conglomerates of South Africa, these specialists are shaping its magnificent future.