PROFESSOR FRANK STEWART.

 

            PROFESSOR STEWART was one of the extraordinary men of the west. He was tall and slim and angular; he might have passed for a twin brother of Abraham Lincoln, though he had a handsomer face than the man of men of his generation. He was Indiana born and could not have received very much schooling, for at eighteen he volunteered in Joe Lane's Indiana regiment and went to the Mexican war. He fought through all that long day at Buena Vista, and could describe it in much more graphic phrases than any historian ever has.

            He was one of the original California Argonauts. If he was not deeply schooled in his youth, he made up for it by incessant study ; he was not a miner, but a wonderful geologist, botanist and all around scientist. He was familiar with the classics, wrote some fine short poems, but his joy was to grasp an abstruse scientific problem and never rest until it was solved. He would rather, from the shells and rocks, calculate the age of the earth than to attend a banquet. He joined Walker's expedition to capture Nicaragua, his reasoning being that it would be a mercy to the people of that country to give them a stable government. They conquered the country, but because of Walker's utter incapacity and unfairness, his command broke up into fragments; Walker, with a few followers, was captured and shot, and Stewart made his way on foot to San Juan, Costa Rica, from there reached the coast and in some way caught a vessel and returned to California.

            He was editing a newspaper at Placerville, Cal., when one day "Snow Shoe" Thompson, who carried the mails on snow shoes over the Sierras between Placerville and Genoa, Nevada, showed him a sample of rock and asked him what it was, explaining that it clogged the sluices and bothered the placer miners in Gold canyon.

            Stewart told him that he did not know, but that it looked as though it might be black sulphide of silver as described in

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the books, and advised him to have it assayed when he reached Sacramento. Thompson did so, with astounding results. The return was nearly $1,000 per ton in gold and over $1,200 in silver. It has never been clear which assay was made first, the one in Sacramento or the one in Nevada City. But they were nearly at the same time.

            Stewart went early to the Comstock. Mount Davidson rises 2,000 feet high just west of the Comstock lode. At first the pitch of the vein was to the west. Professor Silliman being early called to Virginia City to give expert testimony as to the great lode, predicted that the heart of the Comstock would be found under Mount Davidson. This was published in Silliman's testimony. Stewart read it, and with a laugh said if that was true then God Almighty had made a mistake, and had placed the gangue on the wrong wall.

            When explored a little below two hundred feet, the vein suddenly quit. It did not pinch out - - it just stopped. Short drifts were run east from the bottoms of the shafts, then from the east ends of the drifts shallow winzes were sunk and lo, there was the ledge found, pitching east. Xow the hoisting works are a third of a mile down the mountain to the east. By some upheaval the crest of the ledge had been pushed back and broken off so that its natural pitch to the east was reversed near the surface and turned to the west. It deceived Silliman but did not Stewart.

            Stewart explored all the camps of Nevada. His old reports on Tuscarora, though discounted at the time, have been vindicated by the pick, drill and dynamite.

            In early days he gave a series of lectures in California and received the sobriquet of "Earthquake" Stewart, because of the theory that he put out, that the tremblers in California were caused, not by displacements below the surface of the earth, but because of electrical disturbances in the air and in the earth near the surface, and predicted that when railroad tracks and telegraph wares were stretched across the continent, connecting the eastern and far western states, these disturbances would in a measure be neutralized, that the tremblors would grow less and less severe, but that there would be tre-

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mendous electrical storms in the Missouri and Mississippi valleys.

            For like reasons he insisted that California was not a good state for children to grow up in; that they would be high- strung, with abnormal, nervous temperaments, and that like too early ripened apples, would never reach entire excellence.

            He was the kindest-hearted of men, but became impatient in a moment if anything like a question of his geological conclusions was asked.

            After he had spent a month in Tuscarora, he returned to Virginia City, and calling at the Enterprise, was enthusiastic over the new camp.

            A gentleman from New York had brought letters to me and we were conversing when the professor came in. He at once plunged into a description of the camp, and after talking a few moments he suddenly stopped with the remark: 'I will show you just how it is." Then he went to a table, sat down, picked up a pencil and was busy for several minutes making a sketch.  When he had finished it he brought it back, explaining how each mine, thus far, had been located, and then gave the course of the vein as he had traced it from the formation, explaining what mines would be liable to have ore bodies and which would not. His description lasted perhaps fifteen minutes, and then the New Yorker said gently enough, 'This is your theory, Professor."

            "There is no theory about it. That is the way God Almighty made it," said Stewart, savagely, and rolling up his sketch, left the office without another word.

            When any new specimen of rock or shell was shown him, he had a fashion of studying it, sometimes for fifteen or twenty minutes, until he got it classified in his own mind, and then he would explain what it was, to what age it belonged and all about it.

            He seldom drank any strong liquor, but about once in a year or two he would drink for a day or two. After a long absence on a hard trip to some mines he got into Elko one afternoon. At that time there was a district judge in Elko who drank a good deal too much. Meeting Stewart, they

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drank together, then drank again, and as the night came down they were both how-came-you-so, seated at a table in the bar room of the hotel, unconscious that forty or fifty men were looking on and listening The more Stewart drank the brighter he seemed to grow, while the more his companion drank the stupider he became. At last Stewart began to describe that day at Buena Vista; how General Wool, early in the morning, in splendid uniform, great epaulettes and a plumed hat, rode along the lines, crying to the men that it was Washington's birthday and American soldiers could never be whipped on Washington's birthday ; how the battle opened ; how early Jeff Davis, with his Mississippi regiment of riflemen, without a bayonet in the regiment, stopped 4,000 Mexican lancers in full charge ; stopped them and rolled them back, covering the plain with dead men and horses ; how then the fight centered around the regiments of Hardin, McGee and Clay, and all three were killed ; then the storm broke over Lincoln and his regulars and Lincoln was killed, and when Bragg sent back for reinforcements and there being none to send him, General Taylor in person, on his white horse, rode to him and gave the famous order : "A little more grape. Captain Bragg." But this as but preliminary to his description of the prodigies which Joe Lane with his Indiana regiment performed, when suddenly Stewart's friend, the judge, roused up and said: "Professor, were you in that Indiana regiment that ran like blazes from that fight?"

            Stewart stopped talking, looked across the table for quite two minutes at the judge and then broke out with: 'I can't classify you, sir. I don't know whether you are a fool, sir, or a son of a she wolf."

            The listeners shouted with laughter. Stewart looked around at them, then, rising hastily, said : "I think it is an hour after the time when I should have been in bed," and hastily left the room.

            He came into my office one morning with a joyous look on his face, and laid a specimen on my desk, saying: 'What do you think that is?' I said: "It looks like a piece of brick- that was too much burned in the kiln."

196 AS I REMEMBER THEM.

            "Not much," he said; '"the great traveler, just gave it to me. It is a part of a brick which he picked up from the ruins of the Tower of Babel. It proves what I have always said. You know the Bible says a fire came clown from heaven and destroyed that tower. It was just an old-fashioned tremendous electric storm a cyclone and thunder storm combined, and the lightning vitrified that brick."

            He was a Democrat, and with his breeding he never liked New England, always expressing the belief that except for Phillips, Garrison, Sumner, Mrs. Stowe and the others there would never have been any secession or war. But in the eighties some croppings were found in Maine which, being assayed, showed fair values in silver. A Boston company was organized to develop the property. But an expert's opinion was wanted, and one of the directors wrote to one of the great mining companies on the Comstock to send them a man both practical and scientific. Stewart was sent. He was engaged as consulting engineer, which held him in Boston most of the time, only making occasional visits to the property. After three months he wrote me : "Do not waste your life any longer in the west! Come here! I never knew what a whole community of gentlemen meant until I came to Boston."

            From Boston he received a call to examine a mine in West Virginia. He returned with a fearful cold, which soon developed into pneumonia, and he died three days later.

            Poor Stewart; he was altogether a most gifted, manly man.