[Thomas Fitch, Recollections and Reflections No. 1, San Francisco Call, 20 September 1903]

 

 

RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS OF THOMAS FITCH

THE SILVER STATE.

CHAPTER I.

            THIS IS the first of a series of "Recollections and Reflection*" about famous Americans of yesterday by Thomas Fitch, "the silver-tongued orator," who, better than any man of to-day, knows whereof he writes and writes whereof he knows with wit, wisdom and brilliancy truly fascinating. Just watch for his "Recollections and Reflections" of the Bonanza kings, who put a girdle of gold around the world. Next Sunday.

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Copyright 1903 by Thomas Fitch.

 

            A VERDURELESS, treeless, arid plain, stretching away westward from the eastern slope of the pine crowned Sierras, with a few streams tumbling in cascades and rapids from the mountains and coursing through a few narrow green valleys ere they lose themselves in the sagebrush desert— such was the Silver State in 1860, when Horace Greeley said, "Nevada ought to be good for silver, for it is not good for anything else." And the pioneers replied:

                        What though Nevada's hills be sere,

                        Her deserts drear, her tempests cold,

                        Still to her mountain breast

                        The precious ore is pressed,

                        Her brow is silver tressed,

                        Her veins are gold.

            Tens of thousands of the brightest, bravest, most generous, enterprising and energetic men on earth, the Knight Paladins, who challenged the brute forces of nature to combat, the soldiers who, possessed with the aura sacra fames, faced the storm and the savage, the desert and disease, swarmed around the base of Mount Davidson and reached out to Aurora, to Reese River, and to the mountains of the Humboldt. Crawling like huge flies over the bald skulls of lofty mountains, plodding across alkaline deserts, which pulsed with deluding mirages under the throbbing light, and smiting with pick and hammer at the adamantine doors of the earth's treasure chamber, these pioneers engaged in their self-imposed task.     

            Readier with rifle or revolver than with scriptural quotations was the Nevadan of those days and readier still with his coin sack at the call of distress. Under the blue shirt might be found sometimes a graduate of Yale, and sometimes a fugitive from Texas. No man assumed to be better than his neighbor and no man conceded his inferiority to anybody. Freiburg graduates and sheep herders, divinity students and Cornish miners, farmer boys and ex-Judges of the Supreme Court were all treasure seekers together, and a. blow of a pick might make or unmake fortunes and equalize the beggars and the princes of this Aladdin's cave. Some found fortunes and some found unmarked graves upon the hillsides, and many have become rich or renowned in other fields, but not one among them all will remember with other than affection the days away back "in the sixties," when he wrought the warp and spun the woof of rainbows in the Sagebrush State.

            In those days only the upper levels of the Comstock were yielding their treasures, the great Bonanza was undiscovered, the California and Consolidated Virginia exhibited nothing but barren quartz and hope, and those who at a later day controlled the financial and political destinies of Nevada were working as laborers in the mines or mixing cocktails or practicing as members of as brilliant a bar as could be found in any community of thrice its size in all the land.

            Never was there a Berserker in all the realm of Odin who loved to fight for the fight's sake, for the very joy of combat, better than United States Senator William M. Stewart. Glorious, incomparable, indomitable, undismayed, tireless "Old Bill." Though fortune forsake him, though death snatch from him his nearest, though the favored of Plutus intrigue for his toga, though the wand of age has changed his tawny hair and beard to silver, his steel blue eyes have not lost their glitter, nor his port its erectness, and he springs to the front in the tournament of Senatorial debate as vigorous and alert as when he engaged in the contests of the courtroom forty years ago.

            And it was a field of battle in which the warriors were intellectual athletes. Ex-Supreme Justice Charley Bryan, who escaped from desert sand storms and Apache arrows, and at last choked to death on a beefsteak in a Carson restaurant; Thomas H. Williams, who was forced to take a portion of the California mine for a fee, and held it because he could not sell it, and was made a millionaire in despite of himself; Frank Hereford, afterward Congressman and Senator from West Virginia; Messick, and Hillyer, and Baldwin, and DeLong, and Perley, and last but not least, Charles H. S. Williams, who once said to me, "I am going back to California. I have practiced law in Virginia City for a year. I have taken in over forty thousand dollars in cash fees, and I have never tried a case in which I was not forced to know that either by my client or by the client of my opponent the Judge, or the Jury, or both, had been bribed." He returned to San Francisco, failed to recover his lost practice there, and too proud to be second where he had once been first, in a fit of despondency blew out his brains.

            General Williams did not much overestimate the situation, for the voters of Nevada who had previously voted almost unanimously to reject a constitution of State government, believing themselves unable to sustain one, a few months later voted with equal unanimity to adopt one, and whatever reason for this change was given to the public, the real reason was a desire to get rid of the Judges of the Territorial courts. As was wittily said by a delegate in the constitutional convention when the report of the committee on State seal was read, "instead of 'Volens et Potens,' the motto of Nevada ought to be ' Nolens Volens.'" It was this same delegate who insisted that in consequence of the need of legislation it would be well to provide "that for the first two years the legislature shall hold its biennial sessions annually."

            The public opinion of that day concerning the Judicial tribunals of Nevada Territory was inadvertently but aptly expressed by a newly appointed bailiff of the Territorial Supreme Court. He was a long, lean gentleman, of great gravity and dignity of demeanor, with a sonorous voice, a most imposing manner and an exalted idea of the importance of his office. It was his duty at the beginning of the term to announce to the assembled bar of the Territory that its highest judicial tribunal was open for business. No particular formula had been prescribed for such announcement, and it had not occurred to "Baron Pumpernickel," as the bailiff was nicknamed, that it would be all sufficient to say to the lawyers and litigants in waiting, "Gentlemen, the Supreme Court." So, swelling with his importance, the baron stretched forth his arm— "Oyez, oyez, oyez," he cried, "the Honorable the Supreme Court of the Territory of Nevada is now in session. God help the people of the Territory of Nevada."

            Among the lesser lights of the bar of that day was Tom Cox. He was somewhat too bibulous and too scattering to achieve a leading practice in Virginia City, but in the neighboring district, of which Washoe City was the county seat, he was facile princeps. He was a North Carolinian, a college graduate, a student first, of divinity, later of medicine and lastly of law. He was a typical "forty-niner," for he had been a miner, a lumberman and a teamster, as well as a doctor, a preacher and a lawyer. He was an all around sport and as fond of fun as a boy. He was adroit and eloquent at the bar or on the hustings, and it was his boast that he could with equal facility draw a complicated bill in equity without an erasure or an interlineation, and that with a dragoon revolver he could shoot the head off a chicken at twenty paces. He was as free to borrow your money when you had any as he was to loan you his own— when he had any— and he never drew a solvent breath from Monday morning to Saturday night. He occupied a dilapidated one-story wooden building in Washoe City, where he established his law office in the front room, while in the rear apartments he located his living rooms, where he did his own cooking and lived sometimes alone and sometimes with a companion who ameliorated the acerbities of his bachelor life.

            The speech of Tom Cox on the action of Negus against the Ophir Company is a Nevada classic. "Gentlemen of the Jury," said he, "this case has been on the calendar of the court for four years, and for one reason or another its trial has been postponed many times, at the instance first of the plaintiff, and then of the defendant. The attorneys who brought the suit against the Ophir Company have retired from the scene of inhuman activities, one of them peaceably and the other forcibly, and I have taken their place, while the original attorneys for defendant now wear the toga and the ermine. Many changes have taken place since Negus was driven from his wood ranch by the defendants. When this action was instituted the Ophir Company was the Incorporate 'High yu Muck a Muck' of the sagebrush. Its stock sold for $4000 a foot— it paid monthly dividends on each foot of $150. It had a brick house at its reduction works which were surrounded by a high fence to exclude the gaze of the vulgar. It built a bridge across the muddy pond which, when it has any water in it, is called 'Lake' Washoe, so that when the trustees came down every Saturday for their wine dinner they were not obliged to go around the alleged lake to get there. 

            After their wine dinners the trustees occupied the night and sometimes the entire Sabbath in playing the great American game with blue chips and a ceiling limit. The Ophir had a United States Senator and a United States District Judge for its attorneys and its stockholders walked along snuffing the stars. Now, gentlemen of the Jury, how have the mighty fallen. Ophir stock has dropped from four hundred dollars to one hundred dollars per share. The dividends have ceased. The decayed and untraveled bridge across the diminished lake has become useful chiefly as a shelter for young wild ducks, while their pin feathers are growing. The high fence has fallen so low that the lowliest wood packing jackass of the ridge can straddle it, the pop of champagne corks is heard no more in the dismantled brick house, and when the dejected trustees occasionally assemble there they use beans for chips with one cent ante, and ten cents limit, and each director squealing for a sight all the time. The great Ophir Company has struck hot water and desert sand in its mine and come down to Whitman and Fitch for lawyers."

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            There was much activity in the political arena in Nevada as elsewhere in the late sixties, and in the absence of theaters and concerts the crowds who attended upon the hustings were large and appreciative of a good point, whoever it might hit. When the fourteenth amendment was under discussion a candidate for Congress was expatiating upon the dire results to flow from its adoption. "Under it," said he, "if Nevada refuses to admit Chinamen to vote her representation in Congress will be reduced." "Nevada has but one member of Congress," retorted his opponent, "and I do not see how we can reduce her representation unless we elect you."  

            There was a great meeting at Austin called to listen to a joint debate between the Congressional candidates. One of these was a young man with a heavy head of brick-auburn hair, which he parted in the middle, and a well developed bump of self-esteem.  Austin was in the eastern portion of Nevada, 160 miles from the western section, with a desert wilderness between. "My opponent," said one of the speakers, "has been called the young Samson of his party, and I admit the aptness of the comparison. Like Samson he has a heavy head of hair in which his strength mainly lies and which he parts in the middle to avoid disturbing the equilibrium of his intellect. He has come across the desert, which divides Austin from Virginia City in order to enlighten us Philistines upon constitutional law. Like Samson he has come up out of the wilderness hoping to prevail against us, and with the same weapon that was used by his predecessor." The speaker did not say what the weapon was, but the audience caught on.

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            "Mr. Smith," said Judge Caleb Burbank, "you have been convicted of the crime of murder in the second degree, and for some reason not apparent to the court, the Jury has recommended you to its mercy. Your crime was dastardly. While your victim was seated you came behind him, and without any apparent provocation you stabbed him in the back. You are a man over fifty years of age, and it is in the power of this court to sentence you to imprisonment for the remainder of your natural life, but the jury which convicted you has seen fit to recommend you to mercy, and as this court does not feel at liberty to entirely disregard the recommendation of the jury, it will comply with it to the extent of not giving you a life sentence. The sentence of this court is that you be confined at hard labor in the Nevada Penitentiary for fifty years."

            "From what you know of yourself," said Charley Bryan to a smooth-tongued witness who had given damaging, testimony against him, "from what you know of yourself and of your reputation for truth and veracity in this community, would you believe yourself under oath where you were personally interested." The reply is not chronicled.

            "Judge G.," said his partner, "you have violated our partnership agreement and this law firm must be dissolved at once. It was distinctly agreed between us that we were to take turns impartially in getting drunk — week and week about. You have now been drunk two days in my week.  You have failed to control your inordinate appetite for liquor ; you have usurped my privileges; you have deprived me of my bargained rights, and we break up right here and now."

            Colonel Calhoun Thompson, aspirant for Sheriff in an outlying county, perused with indignation an article which appeared in the Carson Appeal reflecting on the character, career and characteristics of all members of the colonel's party, and especially upon those who supported the colonel for office. Determined to vindicate or avenge his friends, the colonel armed himself with a huge hickory cane, a bowie-knife and a pair of Derringers, and, mounting his horse, he rode into Carson. Having hitched his horse and quenched his thirst at the Howling Wilderness saloon the colonel strode over to the newspaper office. It was the noon hour, and all the Appeal force had departed save an undersized, beardless, fragile-looking young man, who was seated at a table in the corner scissoring a pile of exchanges. "Are you," said Colonel Thompson, as he pounded his cane upon the office floor, "are you the blankety blank scoundrel who edits this paper ?" The young man in the corner looked up, snatched a cocked revolver from the table drawer and pointed it at Colonel Thompson. "I insist," said he, "upon my parliamentary rights. I call for a division of the question."

            And he was accorded them, and the scrimmage did not come off.