[Rollin M. Daggett, Brisk Days on the Comstock 2, San Francisco Call, September 10, 1893]

 

BRISK DAYS ON THE COMSTOCK.

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Recollections of Men and Events in Bygone Days in the State of Nevada.

            I closed a previous reference to early events on the Comstock with a friendly tilt at Dr. Webber, who is still living to defend himself should he feel aggrieved. But he is not sensitive, and quite one-half the anecdotes he relates are at his own expense.

            In1884 he was an applicant for the place of Minister resident to the Hawaiian islands, and to defeat his nomination some one of his many opponents circulated the story that he had written to Cleveland agreeing not only to serve without a salary, but offering him the choice of two of the eight islands of the group, which he felt assured a few sittings at draw-poker with Kalakaua would throw into his hands.  Ex-Senator Fair was accorded the privilege of naming the man for the place, and George W. Merrill received the appointment, but the doctor relished the ridiculous scandal connected with his application, and would have done so even had it been the direct cause of his defeat.

            A thought of Dr. Webber suggests a number of other distinguished physicians known on the Comstock in the '60s. Among them were Dr. Bryant; Dr. Bryerly, an accomplished surgeon, who added to a thorough professional education an experience in the hospitals during the Crimean war; and Dr. Bronson, who died in Oakland two or three years ago. The latter was as skillful both as a physician and surgeon as he was eccentric in every other relation in life. He was small and natty in appearance, with large blue eyes, and hands and feet of which he was exceedingly vain. He wore No. 3 boots, which he was fond of displaying, and fancy colored gloves of corresponding size.

            As Brigham Young has been charged with a similar weakness we may excuse it with a smile in Dr. Bronson. But his complimentary estimate of himself was not confined to his feet and hands.

            Dr. Bronson believed, and was by no means modest in claiming, that he was not only the most learned physician and surgeon in the United States, but the most dashing and sagacious financier as well. He would yield his judgment to no one in the valuation of a poker hand or the possibilities of faro, and no stake in a game of chance was too large for him if within the limit of his combined cash and credit. His opinion of himself professionally was not largely an overestimate, for he was certainly a physician of unusual merit, but beyond his calling his dealings with the world were wild and capricious.

            Twice during a period of five years he made and lost fortunes of more than half a million dollars in stock-dealing. The strike in the Crown Point and Belcher gave him a profit of quite $500,000. Less than a year after he filed his petition in bankruptcy. The developments in the Bonanza mines again lifted him to the clouds financially, and he exhibited to me stocks which at an hour's notice he might have converted into $600,000 in gold. I advised him to sell. His Consolidated Virginia was worth $700 per share in the stock boards.

            "Sell that stock for the beggarly price of $700 a share !" he exclaimed, pointing to a bundle of it. "I would rather kindle a fire with it, and I will before I'll sell it for less than $3000. Why, I've just ordered another 200 of it without limit. I know what I'm doing. I've had a talk with Didesheimer. He says there is ore enough in sight to pay the national debt."

            "If correct in your judgment, you will be a very rich man, doctor," I suggested. "What will you do with all your money?"

            "I will put up a building on Market street that will make Sharon's Palace Hotel look like a pig-stye in comparison," replied the doctor energetically. "I will teach the nabobs of Pine street that I can do something besides feel pulses and write prescriptions. But my doctoring days are about over. I shall go out of practice next month."

            But the doctor did not go out of practice. Instead he went into liquidation a few months after, and added a night bell to his office for the accommodation of his patients.

            After wasting his income in stocks for a number of years the doctor finally relocated the Segregated Belcher and received a considerable sum from some source in the way of a compromise. Two or three fortunate stock deals again put him on his feet. I met him at the Palace Hotel. He was full of business sending and receiving dispatches, writing letters and interviewing brokers.

            "Well, I am on top again," he said; "this time to stay. I have lost three or four fortunes, and if I make a fool of myself now I authorize you to blow my brains out." He spoke in the presence of his wife and was terribly in earnest.

            I saw him in Virginia City six months after.

            "Well, Doc. shall I shoot?"  

            "N-o-o-o-o, not yet," he replied with a sickly smile. "I'll tell you when the time's up."

            I knew what he was waiting for. He had a few hundred shares of Hale &Norcross left, the price of which was settling steadily downward.

            He was as game an operator as ever fought the stock market, and fortune had to use both hands and do some kicking to keep him from being a millionaire and erecting a hotel with a frontage of a thousand feet on Market street.

            From doctors to lawyers the step is easy, and a consistent reference to Comstock characters in the sixties could not well be made without including a few representatives of a bar noted alike for its solid attainments and social and professional idiosyncrasies.

            As I prefer to deal with the pleasantries of the past rather than with its flagrant misdemeanors, it will be perceived that I employ a somewhat gentle phrase in designating a period in the judicial history of the Comstock when Judges were corrupted, the verdicts of juries were purchased and troublesome witnesses were killed or spirited out of the Territory; when mining records were tampered with, and witnesses before testifying were drilled in perjuries like squads of raw recruits. Sometimes, to increase the value of their rascally services, these drilled witnesses would overreach themselves. I will present a single example.

            In 1862 the owners of the Yellow Jacket mine, in Gold Hill, swallowed two locations immediately in front of their east line, belonging to the Union and Princess corporations. The Yellow Jacket location, which was the earliest of the three by some days, was made too far up the hill to cover the Comstock fissures, and the owners did not discover their mistake until the real vein was developed by the two companies adjoining. They then sought to rectify it by floating their original boundary lines 200 or 300 feet farther down the hill. It was a difficult undertaking, but Comstock courts and juries were accommodating in those days, and it was successfully accomplished. Several of their witnesses testified that they had seen the original location notice of the Yellow Jacket tacked to a nut-pine stump well down the hill and within the boundaries of the adverse claimants. Finally their principal witness took the stand. He seemed to know all about the Yellow Jacket location, and knew that the nut-pine stump referred to by the other witnesses marked the southeast corner of the original claim of the Yellow Jacket. He saw the notice the day after it was put there. He worked in a tunnel in Crown Point ravine and passed it half a dozen times a day for more than three consecutive months. He had read it frequently

perhaps twenty times, and remembered its phraseology perfectly, and the names of the locators, and glibly recited both to the jury. Such testimony seemed to be unanswerable.

            "Take the witness," said A. W. Baldwin with a smile of triumph, addressing General Charles H. S. Williams, the leading counsel for the Union.

            "Only a single question," replied the general, adjusting his spectacles and slowly removing a scrap of weather worn paper from a clip. "Only a single question," he repeated, handing the scrap to the witness through an officer of the court. "Look at that piece of paper you hold in your hand." continued the general, addressing the witness, "and examine it closely."

            The witness raised the paper to his flushed and troubled face, and for a full minute stared at it vacantly, while every voice was hushed and every eye in the courtroom was turned upon him.

            "Well, sir," resumed the general to the witness, "now that you have carefully examined the paper in your hand, I ask you to read to the jury what you find written upon it, and tell them whether or not it is the same that you have sworn you read so often while passing to and from your work in Crown Point Ravine."

            The witness looked imploringly at his counsel, but as they were ignorant of the character of the paper they could convey to him no instruction. At length, crushing the paper in his hand, with his eyes to the floor he hesitatingly said:

            "I—I—I can't read or write."

            The effect was dramatic. The self-convicted perjurer was not ordered into custody. The Judge took a glass of water, and the most of the jurors did not seem to observe that there was anything inconsistent in the testimony of the witness. They were in the box to fix the boundary at that nut-pine stump and they did it.

            "Nothing further," said the general, setting back in his chair with a satisfied smile. Another witness was called, and the case was proceeded with as if nothing unusual had occurred. Wise men took another look at the jury and went out and sold their Union and Princess shares for what they would bring.

R. M. DAGGETT.